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Refinishing the floors

So obviously we were excited to find hardwood floors downstairs when we pulled up a corner of the carpet. We did that WAY before we had painted because we were curious. Considering the upstairs had hardwood, we were pretty sure the downstairs would as well. Although the upstairs is a wider plank and I think a different wood than is downstairs. I’ll try to get a better picture of the upstairs floors this weekend. They are currently covered in a lot of dust, so that may prove difficult.

Pulling the carpet

This part was fun for me and the girls liked it too. It was a big deal to get to the point where we could pull it up and get it out of the house. My lungs were really excited about it. Plus, it was fun to find out what was underneath that 50+year old carpet. Below is a link to a video of the girls pulling up the carpet.

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/7jXflUYWfHs

Then it was pulling up all the staples and tack strips. It’s a job I don’t mind at all. Morgan and I had a pretty good system for it, too. She would pop the staples up with a flathead screwdriver and I would follow behind and get them with the needle nose pliers. Brandon worked on the tack strips while us girls did the staples. Natalie floated in and out of both processes as 3 year old’s do.

Process that we will most likely follow

Once we got the carpet up, we could see that the floors would need refinishing. The living room has a rug-sized area that is a different stain than the rest of the floors. Plus the south facing windows in the dining room and office/computer room created some sun damage to the floors.

This shows the two different stains and the “rug” that was stained around.

We are going to start upstairs with the refinishing because neither of us have ever refinished floors so we want to start in the rooms where most people probably won’t see. So if we screw up it’s not at the front door when you walk in the house. I am hoping this weekend we get the rest of the upstairs painted, so we can start prepping for the refinishing. I know we will have to get all the quarter round off, which means we will have to label all of it and try to bundle it by room/closet. Then there’s the dust that will need vacuumed, mopped, and vacuumed some more before we even start sanding and creating more dust. We will be getting the ducts cleaned after all this dust has been floating around. 🙂

Brandon and I both have longer weekends over the 4th, so I am thinking we should be making good progress upstairs those days. Once that is done, I’m going to move the girls air mattress upstairs to get them used to sleeping upstairs and farther than a few feet away from us (at either house). I think that will be a major hurdle. I predict it will take a long time before they are sleeping in their own rooms upstairs.

Stain Color

Of course with all this progress on the floors means we need to choose a stain color. I’m pretty decisive when it comes to paint because I know that can be changed relatively easy in the future. But the stain color makes me a little nervous. It’s a big commitment. I don’t think I want to match the trim exactly due to the amount of red that is in the trim. I think that I want something slightly lighter and more neutral in color if that makes sense. So going back to the “rug” picture above, I want more of the rug color, less of the border color. Anyone have any thoughts on that issue? The built ins are even a different color than the trim, so I think it will be fine if the floors don’t match the trim.

Fun Side Projects

Some of the fun projects we have started.

Fixing up the house is a lot of fun, but so are the little side projects for decorating and furnishing the house and yard.

The yard is pretty much a blank canvas since my grandma gave up gardening several years before she passed. My plan is to use some of my dad’s old hog feeders as raised garden beds. We will take the top ring off and I think that will be about the right height. We’ve read where you can fill the bottom 1/3-1/2 with limbs and leaves to decrease the amount of soil you need to put in, so I think that is the current game plan. These will be on the south side of the house, between the driveway and the house.

Outside Projects

I *think* it will be as easy as removing a few bolts to get that top ring off. Then roll them to where we want them. We’ll see…

Then I wanted to add some play things for the girls outside but didn’t necessarily want one of the huge playsets, so I perused trusty Pinterest for ideas. There are a lot of tractor tires around, so I found this idea for a climbing tower.

This is the general idea. I think ours is slightly different with the pole placement. It currently looks a little bit like below.

Actually all four poles are attached now. Next we are going to have my dad lift if with his loader tractor so we can mark the spots in the grass where we need to dig the holes. We have to do that because the a couple of the poles are warped like you can see in the picture. Then we will take it all apart and spray pain the tires some fun colors and resemble. (Can you see the girls in the distance? They were playing safari in the tall grass. Morgan goes in barefoot, but Natalie prefers some footwear.)

We are going to stain the brackets on the roof. Brandon ventured out to make sure they were in okay shape and they seem to be. That will most likely include renting a boom truck so one of us can be lifted up to stain them on the sides of the house. But I think it will really make the “pop” and give some interest to a very white house.

Morgan really wanted to get out on the roof, but that was a hard no. It’s steeper than it looks.

Inside Projects

The next one is one I’m most excited about completing, but it doesn’t need to be done until we refinish the floors downstairs. It will be the lighting fixture for the dining room. Brandon has also found a lamp for the living room he wants to build and I’ll share that once we get closer to making it. Here is the inspiration.

I have glass insulators I purchased from my grandpa Tumbleson’s farm sale, so those will be used and the piece of wood is coming from a barn my dad is taking down on this farm.

You can see the lumber is attached to my SUV to be pulled out, but Brandon ended up cutting it and pulling it out himself. He has a few others to turn into shelves for the living room.

Here they are getting all sanded and ready to be stained. They look great!

There will be many more projects to come. Brandon’s currently reading this book to Morgan at night before she heads to bed, so who knows how many projects will come from there? 🙂

The Beginning

The house is structurally great. The “bones” are good, but my grandparents had not done much in terms of updating since they had moved in 50 years ago.

Both my grandparents grew up in the Depression Era, so they saved EVERYTHING. The downstairs was full but tidy, but the upstairs overflowing and overwhelming. So our first job was cleaning it out. I enjoyed it because it was a job where I could see immediate progress. The girls LOVED it because they got to throw stuff over the bannister to the first floor landing. What kid wouldn’t love crashing stuff down a flight of stairs?

Here are some of the before pictures. Each bedroom is painted a different color, so we refer to them as their color.

That is the top of the landing for the stairs. Yes, that is duct tape on the windows. We haven’t tackled that yet.

This is the blue room. It was the least cluttered and easiest to walk through. Each bedroom also has a large, walk-in closet. The girls will now have plenty of room for their clothes.

This is the closet to the blue room. Morgan will be in this room. She already knows how she wants her closet and it was exactly how I would have arranged it.

The pink room was the worst of all of them. It was jam packed with basically no room to walk through it. I remember riding that horse in my parent’s house. And the baby doll crib was mine that you see in the background.

The pink room’s closet is huge. I thought Morgan would pick it based on the closet, but this room had a hole in the ceiling and she thought she was going to have to live with that, so Natalie gets the big closet! (The hole has been fixed.)

The green room was a little cleared out by the time I got a picture, but it wasn’t terrible.

We knocked a lot out in one weekend with the upstairs. It was pretty easy to toss most of it. The pink room was the worst but really the easiest to clean out because all those boxes you saw in the pictures were empty. They had kept every appliance, gift, or random box they had ever gotten. We would always joke that Grandma always wanted us to keep the box and bows off presents. Now we know where they all ended up. The pink room.

On the next few trips up the girls asked if they were going to be throwing boxes. We found a few more things they could toss down the stairs and over the banister, but it’s pretty much all cleared out. Those pictures are coming…

The New Place

I mentioned in the first blog that we have some big changes coming up and that’s all due to us moving into my grandparents house. It’s a great opportunity for us to live in the country which is something both of us want. Natalie seems to be fully onboard with the idea, but Morgan is more hesitant because she realizes she will be moving away from her friends and school. She has a definite pattern of liking it when we are up there and working, but once we get back to Macomb, she says she wants to stay there. I get it completely. And I am hoping once we are up there and she meets some friends, which she is a total extrovert so she won’t have any issues with that, she will be just fine with the move.

The house does need some work. My grandparents really didn’t do much in the area of updating. The flooring has been the same since I was born and I’m 42. My first goal was to get the main living area painted so we could pull up the carpet. It only took a few hours of being in the house before I was affected by the dust. Then it took me a couple of days to recover once I was out and away from all the dust.

We’ve already done quite a bit and I’ll continue to document that all here, but here is list of things we have done and need to do (and this is an incomplete list.)

Empty the house (it was FULL)
Fix cracks in plaster (upstairs and down)
Fill in all the nail holes (my grandma loved to hang pictures)
Paint the entire interior
Pull up carpet
Remodel bath (reconfigure)
Remodel kitchen (mostly cosmetic)
Rework the entry way
Get electrical checked
Buy new couch
Landscape
Refinish all the floors
Clear out the wasps (they seem to like all the windows)
Refurbish the windows
Outside play area for girls

Like I said above, there’s way more that we will have and want to do, but this is what we are focused on right now. There’s other “fun” stuff like adding some beehives and making the extremely large front lawn into a prairie, but those will wait until some of the other things are done. Structurally the house is great, so it just needs some attention to make it more efficient for us. Brandon and I are planning to do a lot of the work ourselves since it’s things we can do, but other things like the electrical and bath remodel will probably require an expert.

Obviously, there is much more to come with house updates!