Restoration Sans Destruction: Hardwood

And this is my first post here on our new(ish) blog! Allow me to introduce myself. I am the Andrew occasionally spoken of in Gina's entries and half of the Odd Fellows Wrecking Crew (More than half, by weight).

Here at the Odd Fellows House we have a number of projects underway, as our editor in chief Gina has been documenting :-). The house has a number of original features that we are excited to restore and preserve. Perhaps chief among them is the newly unveiled hardwood flooring in our parlor and, if our luck holds, in the master bedroom. The wood appears to be either pine or douglas fir. Here is what we are working with:

While at first blush it may be a little more "blech!" than "yay!", we are quite happy to find the hardwood in such great shape. The wood would have been hand nailed down in 1885, right around the time President Chester Arthur dedicated the Washington Monument; during a period where Indian raids were still an issue in the Northwest Territories. Since that time there have been a lot of plagues unleashed on the hardwood floors of America. Who among us can forget the linoleum fad of the 1950s? What house wasn't touched by the vinyl sheet flooring of the mid-1970s? It has been a dangerous world for floors these past 127 years and we are most pleased at least one of our's made it through (relatively) unscathed. 

While we are overjoyed to not be using a heat gun to loosen adhesive and scrape up asbestos-laden tile in our parlor, we are faced with a dilemma. The floor is certainly not perfect, and it definitely needs some sprucing up (pardon the pun). The last thing we want to do is sand away too much of our wear layer or our face nailed nail heads, and wind up with a floor in need of replacing. The restoration process here will be an exercise in restraint and extremely careful sanding. 

Hopefully, if I get the thumbs up from Gina, we can repair the scuffs and scrapes and avoid having to sand too much!

Tearing up the carpet

While sitting on our porch this morning, our neighbor, the former owner of the Odd Fellows House, mentioned in passing that he had the hardwood floor refinished before putting down the brown industrial carpet that afflicts most of our living areas. We knew there was hardwood underneath but we didn't know what condition it was in. 

We ran inside and started cutting the carpet up. Since this was on a whim, we didn't take out any of the furniture, instead we cut around the furniture, lifted it up and pulled out the pieces of carpet and padding. 

 

It was a bit tight with all of the furniture so we ended up blocking the front door and the door into the kitchen with items. That led to me climbing out of our front window and having Andrew pass me the carpet pieces through the window. Totally normal.

After that, we pried up the carpet tacks and pulled up the staples.

From what we can tell, this is the original hardwood from 1885. It looks like Douglas Fir or pine, and it is laid in flat planks that are top nailed. You can see it from the basement looking up through the floor joists, so there is no subfloor, which is typical of houses built in the late 19th century. The floors have instantly made our house feel more authentic. And all it took was an afternoon, a couple of razor blades and a really bad 90's playlist. 

Turning Our House Back Into a Home

Our home was previously used as an office, so there were some modifications made that we've started to undo. If you remember from the first floor tour video, there was a wall put in to separate the "kitchenette" from the dining room:

You can see from the first whack of Andrew's sledge hammer that taking this wall down is going to do wonders to open up the space in our kitchen:

I can't wait to show you how great the kitchen looks now!

Little Things

Hi! We're still alive! Just a little itchy, swollen and loopy off of Benadryl.  Well, that's Andrew, not me. Andrew, previously immune to poison ivy, was hit hard with a case of systemic poison ivy after our fence project. Lessons we've learned from the past 2 weeks: take care of poison ivy once you see it appear, be extremely careful outside with open cuts, and always listen to Gina. 

While the swelling in Andrew's legs had him off of his feet, relatively few projects were done at the house. So the long weekend came and went with no hardwood floor in the bonus room, no raised garden beds along the fence, etc. It was hard to go back to work and leave Andrew alone, but since his swelling had gone down and his parents were coming to check in on him, I thought it would be okay. A few hours later, I asked Andrew how he was feeling and what he was doing at the house. His response, "little things" included the attached picture:

Tile Riot

What does a typical weekend look like for us? Well, we dig holes, find treasures, put up fencing, tile, grout, visit Home Depot and Lowe's 6 times, nap, grumble about how old we're getting and get eaten alive by mosquitoes. 

Want to know what we found in that hole? Stay tuned!

We're nearing the end of the lease on our apartment, so the bathroom renovation has become our number one priority again. We finished tiling and grouting the shower:

Ain't she a beauty? Now we have to refinish the tub and put in our new vanity and floor. Easy.

We scored yet another tile deal at Home Depot, 17 x 17 inch floor tile for ~$1 per square foot: 

That's right - $26 for the case, normally $45. I'm so glad I waited to buy the floor tile for the bathroom. This is so much better (and cheaper!) than the tile I was gushing over last week. 

And it goes perfectly with the tile we've already installed:

And yes, in that picture, I am standing next to the tile, claiming our batch and refusing to move while Andrew got a cart and loaded it up. I was prepared for a tile riot, but thankfully it didn't come to that. 

House Detectives

One of my favorite parts about owning an old house is all of the little mysteries, like: why are there two closets in the bathroom? Is there hardwood under this carpeting? How many suitcases full of belly buttons were kept in this terrible scary basement?

At Odd Fellows, one of our biggest questions was: why isn't there a washer/dryer hookup?!?

We had a clue that there may have once been a washer/dryer in the house when we looked at the circuit breaker. There were a few switches marked "dryer," but they gave no indication of where they referred to. 

We started walking around the house, knocking on walls and talking about where we would put a laundry station if we had the chance. In the bathroom? There is that extra closet, and that means we wouldn't have to go up and down the stairs with laundry. In the "mud room"? We both had our eye on that room for our office, I know I dreamed of running on my treadmill while listening to 90's pop music, enjoying the high ceiling and great view of the backyard. 

Both of our eyes settled on the strange ledge that jutted out of the far corner.  "Isn't the hose hookup on the other side in the backyard?" Andrew asked. "That's where my TV is going to go!" I thought. 

A few swings of the sledge hammer later and, we had gained a space for our washer and dryer and lost a whole lot of Spice Girl medleys. 

Happy Father's Day

Happy Father's Day!

I am very lucky to have a dad who is smart, handy and hard working. Growing up, we didn't have people we called to redo the kitchen or fix an issue with the toilet.  There was always a Fred solution (most famously, he told my mother and I that to redo the kitchen, we would just have to pull the old cabinets out and slide the new ones in. It didn't turn out to be so simple). 

My dad taught me to take care of myself, to know how to do things around the house and to build an entire kitchen's worth of cabinets (with little Freddy's help, of course). 

His determination is the reason I wasn't afraid to buy a fixer-upper, even though I knew that the road ahead of Andrew and I would be long and tough. 

 Happy Father's Day, Dad. Thank you for all the lessons. I know they will continue to support me during scary new leaps of faith.

He's a tiling fool!

I love getting picture updates from Andrew throughout the day. While I am helping patrons with their Kindle Fires, Andrew is on fire. He's a tiling fool.  Look at that shower!!

In other tile news, I am in love with the floor tile we've picked out:

It's called Cairoo and it is from Home Depot, of all places. This bathroom is starting to get so fancy we'll have to start calling it a powder room and hire Thomas to stand in it and offer fresh towels. 

Fresh towel, sir?

I promise I'll have more updates soon that are not tile related. Right now the focus is on emptying our storage unit so that our stuff doesn't end up on STORAGE WARS.

Ugly Things and Pretty Things

Andrew is making great progress in the bathroom, although things still look a bit ugly if you ask me (do you see that orange wall color with the black tile? The house is already next to a cemetery, let's not drive the Halloween thing home tooooo much). 

I made great progress in picking out pretty (non-Halloween) tile. We're using U.S. Ceramic 6x6 tile in bone from Home Depot and allen + roth 3x8 Emperador Espresso Marble tiles as an accent from Lowe's. 

We were able to get a flat of the bone colored 6x6 tile at Home Depot for $100 (that's over $1,000 in savings for those of you keeping track!). We'll be using it for the kitchen back splash as well. Oh,  you haven't seen the kitchen? Don't worry, you're not missing much!

Our plan is to try out the Rust-Oleum tub refinishing kit on that pink monster of a tub. The customer pictures on Home Depot's website are really encouraging (how do you like that lime green tub?!!). 

Due to my work schedule, I don't get a lot done during the week but I was able to hang 2 curtains yesterday. At 10pm, wearing heels, and cursing very loudly as they fell on my head over and over. 

Yeah, that's nothing to be proud of, but it gives us some privacy for the time being. I don't think our view is that bad, though, what do you think? 

It starts...

As our heads hit the pillows on the blow-up mattress on our second night at the house, Andrew grunted, "Tomorrow, I'm tearing out that shower."