Things have slowed down a bit with the contractors recently. It has been almost a week since we’ve had anyone actually doing anything to our house. However, we have had a couple stop out to get information on how to proceed with a few things.

First, one of the supposed flooring “experts” in town stopped by to check out the flooring damage. He is supposedly the best in the town according to our general contractor. While I wasn’t here to talk to him, Casey followed him around as he looked things over. In our living room, where both the tongue and groove sides of the flooring bowed out due to the moisture, and the flooring buckled in a couple areas, he claimed that it all had to come out. Same with the office on the main floor. He suggested replacing the maple (some of it is birds-eye) with oak because it is stronger and cheaper (price doesn’t matter when insurance is going to cover it, by the way flooring guy as long as it isn’t more expensive than what is in here). Then he looked at the steps going upstairs. He claimed that they were not sandable (which I have a hard time believing since they are a single board per step) and should be replaced.

Next, he looked at the upstairs which is all douglas fir, including the bathroom floor I spent hours and hours stripping of linoleum:

He said it all should come out as douglas fir isn’t a very hard wood.

First off, I put too much work into that floor to yank it out. It doesn’t look pretty in the pictures, but I’m certain it will sand out extremely nicely. Secondly, I don’t care if it isn’t as hard of a wood as, say, oak. Two reasons: one is that it is in pretty darn condition being that it is 80 years old, and the second is that I consider a ding or discoloration here and there “character.” It speaks to you. New flooring just doesn’t do that.

As far as the main floor, erm, floors go, I don’t see why it all has to come out. There are a couple spots that I can imagine the nails have failed and would have to at minimum be pulled up and renailed. Worst case is they’d have to replace the boards in that section. I have a few chunks of maple from when the kitchen/bathroom was turned into one room (granted it has a few layers of linoleum, nothing I haven’t seen before, right?) that could be used to fix these sections.

Granted, maybe he is just trying to give a worst case call for the insurance to make sure we can get what we need fixed without insurance breathing down our necks. However, Casey said he made remarks about how the wood they used for our trim is supposedly garbage. Does he think we are going to go pull the 80 year old trim off the walls and run to Home Depot and grab some crap wood to replace it? Sure… we’ll get right on that on boss.

We have a different contractor who is going to do the bathroom flooring upstairs, and if we are happy with the results there, we will have him do the main floor as well as he seemed confident the majority of the floor could be salvaged and seems a bit more on our side.

Besides flooring, we still have an uninsulated kitchen and bathroom and our temps aren’t supposed to get above zero for the next several days so I really hope they can get in soon to get these walls covered. Our heating bill is going to be outrageous…

All in the life of a homeowner right?

It has been a whole month since the first post on the blog. In a way, it feels like forever, but at the same time, we still aren’t fully unpacked yet. Since that first post a month ago, we’ve been on a bit of a rollercoaster.

We were pretty excited to be a few days away from closing, giving you the low down on our house. Then we talked about our leaning tower of garage. At that time, our big decisions were when we wanted to tear that down and rebuild it, and when we wanted to finish the basement. Boy, were we in for a surprise when our house took a shower and damaged just about everything.

From there, the garage and basement refinishing dropped down to the bottom of the list as we listened to lots of loud fans and dehumidifiers. To help keep our minds off of it, we spent some time showing you our house’s layout. That didn’t help much, as I got quite antsy as you might recall (assuming you didn’t get bored before getting that far back…). We did get a couple good suggestions of out that post though, drinking and then working on little projects (make sure you leave some time between those two activities…).

Then we tried to be house historians and guess how the back stairs might have been. While wrong, it was nice to figure out what originally was set up in that closet (there wasn’t one)…

Then we finally got busy, with contractors showing up, tearing things down, and overal getting things done. That is a good. Thinking about demolition guys taking out the original trim work, well, that is uncomfortable. Don’t worry, all that fretting was for naught as we came home to our gutted out kitchen (at least the exterior walls that had insulation).

Then things got dirty for me as I began removing linoleum from our hardwood floors in our bathroom, which was the root of all our water problems. All the while, it got cold here, record cold. Around that time, we asked the (apparently four… minus me, makes three) readers of this blog if we should paint or not paint the trim in the bathroom upstairs. While those four (ok, three) people were voting, I was working my tail off on gutting out the bathroom walls.

Once the walls were out, I worked on finishing removing the linoleum from the hardwood floors. While I was doing that, Casey had her own projects she was working on.

Overall, it has been one heck of a month here in our new home. It wasn’t what we had expected, but in the end, we’ll have the house the way we want it, and will knock off a few items from our long term goal list that we weren’t expecting to get to for a long time (like getting our bathroom back to hardwood floors, or putting a clawfoot tub in).