Do odd things happen in your old house, too? Jenny and I have never really felt "alone" here in our home, though we've also not had a whole lot happen that we thought was out of the ordinary. Lately, though, we've had at least two incidents that seemed to be strange.

We've been having a fun weekend here at the Jenny and Jonathan homestead. All kinds of stuff has been happening, and now we're about dead tired.

Well, we've finally done it--we started work today in the middle bedroom. After I bought the house, I had originally planned on that to be the first room that I restored. At the time, it was filled with junk from the previous owner's son, whom she had kicked out of the house a while before I bought it. I first got rid of all of that, then started to clean it out. The first thing to go was the disgusting carpet. Conveniently, I was able to just toss it out the second-story window in the room, then drag it to the trash outside, without having to carry it through the house.

This post was written for Houseblogs.net as part of a sweepstakes sponsored by True Value. 

This past December, we finally finished the first phase of restoration in our living room. 

As many loyal readers know, this project was long in coming.  The room, as it was, was pretty dreary.  The 1960's-era, cigarette-smoke-stained wallpaper was ugly and just plain gross.  The drop-ceiling from about the same era was out-of-place and looked awful, especially considering that we had recently restored the dining room and removed the drop ceiling in that room, making the difference even more obvious.  The large front window had been painted shut for many years, cutting-off a valuable source of ventilation during the hot summer.  The carpet had been abused by a few generations of cats, I think, including ours.  There was a place where a fireplace should be, but it was bricked-up and hidden from view.  All of the woodwork was painted.  There was no central light in the room.  It was just begging to get back to some of its former glory and function. 

We started on the project almost a full year before we finished.  Shortly after the Christmas decorations came down during the previous January, we started demolition in the living room.  I hate to use a word like "demolition," but that's what we were doing.  The ceiling had to come down, which involved removing all of the tiles, then the support structure, then the support structure anchors.  The people who installed this stuff had little regard for the condition of things behind the tiles.  There were lots of test holes in the ceiling where they went looking for joists, cracked plaster bits where they were trying to nail into studs or anything in the wall to hold up the side frames, and just a general mess in other areas. 

Jenny and I are lucky to have supportive families.  My family is pretty close, and they were able to come down for several work sessions so that we could make good progress on the room.  My Dad was here a lot, helping with all sorts of things, from demo, to electrical, to wood finishing, to painting. On one of those work sessions, we were getting a little curious about the fireplace.  Jenny was at work, so we took a hammer to the wall and smacked at the most hollow-sounding spot we heard.  A slab of rough mortar fell away, and we could start to see the bricks that were covering the firebox opening.  About an hour of hammering and brick-moving later, and the firebox was revealed!  It was full of debris from what looks like the old fireplace surround.  We were able to salvage some tile parts from there, which we hope to be able to match someday when we can get this fireplace back in order.  There's no mantel for it yet, but it feels so much better to have it open!  I was building a wooden screen for just this purpose, which we now have in place in front of the open firebox. 

In addition to the drop ceiling, we were also stripping wallpaper.  The 1960's wallpaper came off easily in whole sheets.  It was a vinyl-like material with a pretty loose glue, and it just peeled right off the walls.  We had the same stuff in the dining room.  In there, it had been adhered to clean plaster walls, as the people installing that paper had stripped the walls.  In this room, though, they didn't strip the walls, so we had to then deal with multiple layers of ancient wallpaper on nearly every square inch of the walls.  In the dining room, we only had to deal with old wallpaper above the level of the drop ceiling, which was only a band about eight inches wide at the top of the wall.  That took a while to do, but it wasn't horrible.  This wallpaper just didn't want to give up!  Generous applications of Dif, though, persuaded it (and its awful adhesive) to finally give-up and come free from the walls.

In the middle of all of this, my Dad also helped us to re-wire the living room outlets.  Everything had been on one circuit, which also fed large portions of the second floor.  We severed those connections and ran brand new wiring to put two of the three outlets onto one circuit, and a third outlet got a separate circuit specifically for the A/V equipment.  Woo hoo!  We could now run the fan, two heat guns, lights, and the air conditioner in the bedroom at the same time! 

While we were working on the room, we decided to also strip the paint from the woodwork.  This wasn't originally part of the plan. We had intended to leave it alone and do it later.  After I tested a part of the trim, though, we couldn't resist.  The paint looked horrible next to the small section that I stripped, so we proceeded with gusto--at least with as much gusto as we could muster, given that we were working with heat guns in protective gear during some of the hottest parts of the summer! 

Weeks stretched into months, and we were still working.  Around November, we had a week that was going to be pretty mild.  I decided that this was a good time to remove the sash from the big front window so that we could finish stripping, sanding, and finishing it and the window frame.  Again, my Dad came down, and we worked a bit of a marathon to get this done and get it reinstalled.  We weren't really happy having a big hole in the front of the house covered with only some thin plastic sheeting to keep out any really cold weather.  We were lucky that the mild weather held for the whole week, and we were able to get it finished and reinstalled before the really cold weather returned. 

We knew that there was hardwood under the carpet, and we hoped to pull-up the carpet to get to it.  Before we pulled-up the carpet, though, we expected to leave it in place to serve as a drop-cloth during woodwork finishing and then painting.  We employed as many people as we could to finish stripping and sanding the woodwork.  There really is no good way to do this part.  There are lots of tiny curves and decorative bits that no power sander could handle, which translated to lots of hand sanding.  After that was a lot of cleaning of the wood to ensure that it was as dust-free as we could get it, and then the shellacking began.  Everything had to get three coats minimum, and four coats if possible.  After all was said and done, the baseboards got three, and the window and door frames all got four.  The fourth coat really resulted in a nice appearance on the showy parts of the trim.  It was hard to tell the difference with four coats on the baseboards, so we stopped there at three.  

Then there was the painting to do.  Here's my Dad helping to prime the walls and ceiling, on yet another one of his trips here to help us.  Needless to say, our arms were pretty tired at the end of all of this.  While my dad rolled, I cut-in and did the parts where the roller wouldn't fit. 

After the primer was dry, Jenny and my Dad alternated helping to get the room painted with two coats of gold, and a lighter version of the same gold on the ceiling.  I can't remember the name of the wall color, but the ceiling was called "Belgian Waffle".  I got a kick out of that name. 

Finally, thanks to the help of a lot of people, we were actually finished.  The picture here is a panoramic view of the living room (click on it to see the full view).  We later hung some artwork on the walls that had been waiting for quite some time.  For New Years, we attended First Night Pittsburgh, where we found two paintings that we purchased to put in the room as well.  Now it's looking pretty finished.  We still need to get a mantel, but we're so happy with how comfortable the room is that we can't stop "living" in it! 

More pictures can be found here.  It was a lot of fun, but we're glad to be sitting in the room now, instead of working on it.

So here I sit getting ready to head to lunch, and I find myself with a few minutes to write something. 

Jenny and I have been working lately on things that have been vaguely house-related, but have been covered in other entries.  We've been hanging curtains to replace some of the nasty old ones that came with the house when I bought it.  We've been cleaning (and cleaning, and cleaning some more) for various social gatherings.  We have been re-organizing the back bedroom so that it could function again as a guest bedroom and not be quite so cluttered.  We've been working on general yard upkeep.  We've been hosting social gatherings for various events.  I've been in the woodshop making gifts and working on a few small shop projects to help me to make those gifts.  We've also been spending some time resting from work and doing some things that we enjoy, like picnics and a little bit of bike riding and the like.  The rest of the time has been spent working or tending to other obligations that have been keeping us both quite busy this spring. 

While all of this has been going on, we've been thinking, too, about projects in the house.  I'm working on getting a few estimates for the work on the porch, which we must absolutely do soon.  I also need to meet with our landscaper friends to get an estimate on repairing the retaining wall that borders the alley.  The wall might be able to wait a little bit.  The porch cannot wait any longer. 

I've also been thinking about the work in the middle bedroom that we want to do.  That was the first project that I ever started in the house.  It ended up getting back-burnered for a lot of reasons.  My sister and her former boyfriend helped to strip some of the wallpaper in there that I hadn't finished, so the really hard part of wallpaper stripping is essentially all finished.  There's a lot of the old, thick adhesive left on some parts of the walls, but that dissolves pretty easily with Dif.  We also have to think about whether we want to do the woodwork in that room--I would love to do it, but we need to determine if it is feasable.  There are some odd electric issues in the room, too.  There's nothing really problematic, but some odd things were done to get outlets into different spots in the room, and I need to have my Dad come down to help me figure out what we're going to do about the resulting mess.  The room will need a light fixture (it didn't have one when I bought the house--just a crappy ceiling fan that used to have a light fixture below it).  The room will also need a throw rug to cover the middle section of the floor.  The outside few feet are all hardwood, but the middle section is just unfinished subfloor boards that bring the middle part of the floor level to the hardwood.  Odd, yes, but we can deal with it. 

Before we can do anything in there, though, we need to clean out all of the stuff.  The room has become our storage room.  Some stuff needs to be sold or given away.  Some stuff needs to be stored for possible future use by other people.  Some stuff needs to be stored because it means something to us.  Some stuff just needs to be thrown away.  That's going to be a big job.  I want to start going through that stuff soon to figure out what is going where. 

I've also been thinking about some needed stuff for the house, including a linen closet on the second floor to hold all of our towels, sheets, etc.  I have plans for some small tables that I'm building for us to use outside on the porch.  I also have some more gifts to make for people for various things. 

Oh, did I mention that this is my last "free" weekend until probably the middle of July?  Argh. 

So there it is.  Now it is lunchtime. 

jonathan

Lots of other updates for today, but this gets a separate post, since the other stuff is generally not house-related.  :)  Pictures from the final day of the floor installation, last Saturday, start here.  Enjoy! 

jonathan

Well, the floor in the dining room is finished!  This was a crazy project.  This is what happens, I suppose, when one thinks that hey, this project can't be that bad.  This was supposed to be a quick fix to bring the dining room's appearance into line with the nice, fresh living room.  We were supposed to pull up the crappy old wall-to-wall carpeting and find the same nice hardwood floor that we found in the living room.  We were supposed to be cleaned-up and have the furniture back in the room that same day. 

As with most old house "quick" jobs, this one turned into a bit of a monster.  In the previous entry, I detailed how we found plywood under the carpet, instead of a nice hardwood floor.  Jenny and I made the decision to go ahead and spend the money to put in a hardwood floor, using the existing plywood as the subfloor.  We went with a 3/8" product that is actually a hardwood veneer.  This does a few things for us, including simplifying installation, making the floor level not such a great change from the surrounding rooms, and increases the stability of the product (solid wood floors will move with changes in humidity, but a plywood product with a hardwood veneer doesn't move much at all).  The product was also pre-finished, so we didn't have to worry about renting a drum sander and then dealing with applying a finish.  Installation was staple-down (small-crown one-inch staples) with a pneumatic stapler, which I already had.  This installation method meant that we could work at our own pace, and could use the floor immediately after it was finished.  Some glue-down methods, besides being messy and far more permanent than mechanical fasteners, require waiting some amount of time before one can use the floor.  Since one must pass through the dining room to get to the kitchen and basement, and it is winter here with lots of snow and cold outside, having to use the outside to get to the kitchen was not such a great idea.  Besides that, we wanted a floor that made sense with the house, and a real wood floor with mechanical fasteners was really the way to go. 

During the past week Jenny and I managed to get about half of the floor finished.  There are a lot of cuts necessary in this room, due to the interesting shape and floor features.  Two thirds of one wall are at 45 degrees to the other walls, so all of the boards there needed a miter cut.  Basically, it involved a lot of cutting, and a lot of scribe cuts around wall and doorway features.  I'm leaving tomorrow for a short trip, but I didn't want to leave Jenny with a half-finished floor and furniture spread all over the first floor.  My Mom offered to come down to help today, and my Dad came with her, so the four of us got started working like crazy at around 11:30 this morning.  We had furniture back in the room and were completely cleaned-up at around 7PM.  That included about 15 minutes for a break in the mid-afternoon, and about 30 minutes for food a little while after that. 

While we were working, my Dad was also shooting some video for our future old house restoration podcasts!  I'm excited about this.  We were originally going to do some video on the living room restoration today, too, but we just ran out of time.  Jenny and I need to hit the road early tomorrow so that I can catch my train (which is, incidentally, already listed as 30 minutes late), and I still had to pack, so the living room video had to wait.  That's okay, though, because I am now completely exhausted.

It feels great to be done with this floor.  I keep looking in there and thinking about how much better it looks.  One casualty of this work, though, was the quarter-round for the room.  It was in really bad shape--even worse than the stuff in the living room.  It had some rot issues around where the windows are, and had already been damaged when the last people pulled it up to put in the plywood floor.  It had pieces of carpet painted to it, and just looked really, really bad.  It had to go.  I hated to do it.  On one hand, it is probably the original quarter-round that went with the trim (though that's almost impossible to tell for sure), and I hated to throw away the work of some assistant to the assistant to the assistant of some craftsman.  On the other hand, there was little hope for getting this stuff back in shape.  It had already been cracked over nearly every length by the previous people who removed it, and some of it just fell apart when I tried to remove it.  Of course, some parts of it were in good shape and were really hard for being pine, but there wasn't enough there to save for anything.  When I get back from my trip, I'm going to call up our favorite lumber supplier (Mars Lumber) to see if they can supply some quarter-round in clear pine, and find out how much that might cost.  I'm going to have to measure to see how many linear feet we need, but it should work out pretty well.  I'm also going to need to get some decent looking red oak to build some moulding to go around the hearth, as I want to make it look somewhat like the one in the living room, and have something to cover the edges of the new wood. 

The room was, surprisingly, just about square.  It had a difference of about a quarter inch over the length of the wall when we were putting in the last row of flooring.  I think that's pretty good for an old house.

So now we're finished.  I made some sandwiches for the train ride tomorrow, and now have to pack and hit the sack.  Unfortunately, I already packed my mini-usb cable, so I can't get the pictures off of my camera right now.  I'll have to get them when I get back from my trip.  In the meantime, Jenny will have a floor to enjoy.  I hope the cats like it.  :) 

jonathan

We got the floor started today.  Mass came first, then Jenny and I went to brunch at my parents' house to see my sister Sarah (and have some brunch, of course :) ).  We came home so that I could get changed, then I went to the funeral home for an old friend who died early.  While I was there, Jenny bundled the padding and took it outside, then brought the shop vac downstairs and swept up the years of dust, leftover staples, and shredded bits of padding.  She was just finishing up when I got home, so I got changed into work clothes and got the compressor and staple/brad gun ready.  To keep us from going entirely insane, I put the compressor outside and covered it with a trash can to protect it from the weather (that little pancake compressor is LOUD).  Someday, I'll get a non-oil-free compressor that runs quietly.  I'm glad I have it for this project, though. 

The first thing we had to do was to snap a chalk line at a point that was the width of one piece of flooring plus 3/8" away from the wall.  We decided to keep the orientation that was in the living room, and I decided to start on the easiest wall in terms of cuts.  One of the things that most flooring installation guidelines seem to recommend is to undercut door jambs, to avoid having to do scribe cuts.  Well, I refuse to do that.  All of the other flooring in this house is scribe cut around obstacles, and I refuse to cut wood here to make things "easier" for me.  This, of course, means more work, but I won't feel like I'm betraying the house's builders in the process. 

The first row went in pretty quickly, with only a few bumps needed that were taken care of with a file.  Of course, this room is full of angles, and many of the pieces will need to be cut in various ways.  After we got moving, the rows started to come in a little more quickly.  We took a break for dinner at around 6PM or so.  We decided to go somewhere, just to get out of the work zone for a bit.  We came back a little before 7:30PM, and got back to work.  Jenny turned on the Grammy's so that we could watch and listen to that while working.  She had brought me enough wood to work for a while, so she went to wrap up in a warm blanket while I finished the rows that I could.  I was getting tired, so it was getting time for me to stop.

The end result is that we have about 40 square feet of flooring down.  It doesn't look like that much, but it is also the widest section of the room.  Due to a meeting that I have to attend tomorrow evening, work on the floor is probably going to be a no-op.  That means that my next workday for the floor is going to be Tuesday evening.  If we had a full day of work today, we probably would have manged to get a little further on the installation, but oh well.  It looks pretty good, though, except for all of the mistakes that I see.  I guess that's the curse of DIY--one always sees their own mistakes.  :)   I just hope that the room is mostly square when we get to the other side, or else I'm going to be doing some odd things to make it look square. 

Oh!  I almost forgot.  Pictures here!
jonathan

Shortly after my last post, I jumped online to do some quick research and get some prices.  We had a few important limitations:

• Floor should be no more than 1/2" thick.  The plywood was already level with the other floors around it, so we didn't want to have a huge threshold jump.
• Floor should not be a glue-down floor.  We wanted either mechanical fasteners or floating.  I had a slight preference for floating, due to the supposedly easier installation.  We didn't want an adhesive for a few reasons, two of the primary ones being installation issues (wait time until dry, mess, etc.), and most concerning was the floor's permanence when using adhesive.  With a mechanical fastener, we can reasonably expect to be able to pull up the flooring at some point without a huge amount of damage to the plywood.  Since the plywood is in good condition, it could potentially serve as the subfloor for all kinds of other flooring, so we didn't want to face the prospect of ripping it out and having to replace it needlessly. 
• Floor should be relatively easy to install.  This project has great priority right now because we prepared only for a temporary rearrangement and inconvenience.  If this stretches for more than a few days, then I'm going to have to come up with some other solution for the dining room furniture, other than having it sitting in the living room like it is now. 
• Floor materials must be available today, ready for pick-up.  This one is a biggie.  See the above point for one reason why.  With a few weeks of lead time, we may have been able to order precisely what we wanted, but that wasn't a viable option. 
• PRICE!  We don't have thousands of dollars to spend on a floor that we thought was going to be an easy, one-day, zero-cost job.  We figured that we might have to spring for a large carpet for the room, if the center of the floor was in nee of some help.  That was going to cost around $300-$400.  We were hoping that we wouldn't have to do that. 

After my research and showing what I found that fit these qualifications to Jenny, we decided to make the trip to Lowes to take a look at these things in person to see what we liked.  We had two definite products in mind.  One was a parquet floor that went down in one-foot square blocks.  The floor quality was good, but what I was nervous about was that it was supposed to be glued-down.  I was trying to avoid glue, and hoped that I might be able to use mechanical fasteners (pneumatic staples, in the case of flooring).  Jenny didn't like it much online, and neither of us liked it in person.  The second product was an "engineered" (read:  veneered wood) wood flooring.  This product looked quite good in person.  The veneer isn't thick enough to take a future sanding for refinishing, but it has a 15-year wear-through warranty on the finish, which I liked.  It is a standard tongue-and-groove 3/8" thick flooring product.  The price was pretty reasonable, even with the threshold moulding that we had to buy.  We looked at a few laminate flooring options, too.  Though we found some that looked pretty decent, they all almost invariably looked like new construction.  I had also heard "horror stories" of laminates coming undone after a few years, gashes and other damage that can seriously impact the floor, etc.  The only major problem that I had with the flooring was that the floor was in 3" wide boards, instead of the 2 1/4" that we have in the living room.  We were willing to sacrifice that, though, so we came home with about $1000 worth of hardwood floor in the car. 

Yes, it is more expensive than a carpet, and more expensive than the laminate flooring.  It isn't as expensive as some of the other flooring options we saw there-this product was price quite reasonably.  The 15-year warranty is a big deal for us, too, as it means that we should be able to get the floor to last at least close to that long.  In the end, we decided that it would be better for our sanity and better for our house to install a real wood product in the room.  We couldn't justify doing a shoddy job in this room, after we worked as hard as we did to get the living room in shape. 

The only problem with all of this, of course, is that I've never installed a hardwood floor.  The flooring company (Armstrong) had great directions available online, though, and I've seen this process done before, so hopefully we'll be able to make this happen. 

After we got home with our flooring and got it all into the house, we got back to work on the rest of the carpet cleanup.  I had already rolled, bundled, and removed the carpeting itself to the outside.  We still had to work on getting all of the tack strips removed, and then the padding and infernal staples.  Since we were now doing a hardwood floor, too, the quarter-round also had to be removed, as well as the thresholds for the doors to the kitchen and hallway. 

I worked for a little while on my own taking up the tack strips.  I needed to get a start on those so that Jenny would have a place to work to start removing staples.  Once I had a few of the tack strips removed, she got to work pulling up staples and getting the padding ready for bundling.

After I had the tack strips removed, I went around and started on the quarter-round.  Some of this stuff was in good shape, and came up without any issues at all.  Some was in really bad shape, and broke and splintered in different places (not to mention the few pieces from under the windows that practically just fell apart in my hands).  While I was doing the quarter-round, I also decided to remove the ugly heat register.  It was in pretty bad shape, and was ugly, so it had to go.  While I did this, Jenny continued to work on the staples. 

After I was finished with all of that, there were still some more staples left.  ARGH!  So she and I worked on staples up until about 6PM, when i twas time for us to clean ourselves up and head for my parents' house for dinner and to see my sister, who came home from Baltimore .  After dinner, I was headed out to see a few friends of mine who I haven't seen in a while.

By the time we left for dinner at my parents' house, all of the staples were removed.  All that remains now is to bundle the padding pieces, sweep the floor, and we'll be ready for action on the floor installation.  I hope to have the majority of it done by tomorrow.  We'll see how well that works. 

Pictures coming soon....

jonathan

Apparently, someone else had issues with the floor in there at one point, and replaced it with a plywood floor.  It isn't bad plywood, but it is still plywood.  Interestingly, whoever did this put a finish of some sort around the outside two feet or so of floor, which makes it look like they had some type of carpet in there in the middle of the floor, and this finished plywood stuff around the outside.

So now Jenny and I are considering our options, and thinking about one of those snap-together laminate flooring things.  I'm going to price one out right now.  The room is only about 250 sq. feet, so that isn't too bad. 

jonathan