Hardwood floors, part deux

Remember those hardwood floors? I know it has been awhile, but several weeks ago, they were finally finished!


Aren't they beautiful?? Hubby is overly critical of his work and keeps telling me (and anyone else who will listen) that they are not professional quality, but I don't think anyone is going to look THAT closely at them. It did create a nasty little monster in hubby after all of his hard work though--it would be the "we cannot walk, touch, or move near the floor with shoes on" monster. That gets frustrating very quickly. Every time we plopped on the couch to watch tv it would scootch just a little across the floor and he would moan. And I do mean every time. I was also banned from wearing heels across the floor, or any shoes for that matter. Bare feet were banned as well, which meant only socks were allowed on this hallow ground. All of these rules also meant I could hardly function as a normal person in the room.

About a week after the floors were finished I went to Lowes and ordered rugs. Problem solved. Now we can not only use the room like normal people, but it keeps the floor warmer, helps eliminate echos, and adds just the right touch the room was looking for. Of course, the only reason I think hubby was ok with it was because our cat (details on her reserved for yet another post) refused to walk across the hardwood floor because it was too cold for her paws and would leap around on the furniture to get to her favorite window perches. She's happy now too.

Now if we could just attack this beast in the corner the room would be complete.


Alas, Rome wasn't built in a day, and clearly, neither will this house.

Brief Hiatus

What usually happens to my blogging ventures has occured yet again--life gets busy, I get away from this for a few days, and suddenly it's been 3 weeks since a post! Not much has happened in these 3 weeks, but an update is still necessary. Primarily, the beginning of "wedding season" has begun for Hubby and myself. I refer to this as a "season" because for the past several years we have had what could only be described as the Iron Man of wedding attendance. This year alone we will have invitations to 10 weddings, and we will/have already been in 3 of these...needless to say, March to November has turned into a hectic time of year for us. We honestly don't mind it, most of these people are close friends of ours, it just leads to very busy weekends.

I digress. Work on the house has been slow. Very, very, very slow. If nothing else, I have learned that patience is a necessity when it comes to doing work on your home. The last few weeks have been devoted to "finish" work, or all the little stuff that no one really wants to do, but is completely necessary for your home to look presentable.

This leads to our very interesting Tuesday night. Hubby had exhausted his supply of crown molding trim, so we decided to trek over to trusty Lowes and pick up a contractor pack, not thinking that my trusty SUV--DT (Darnell Tyrone) as we refer to it--might not be able to handle the size of the load. Off our happy selves went, purchased three contractor packs of molding, each "pack" holding eight 12 foot pieces of molding, only to get out to my car and realize that it is not 12 feet long. So we did what every good redneck does--improvise. We opened the hatch and drove the whole 30 miles home with an extra 4 feet of molding hanging out of the back of my car.

Talk about country come to town!

kitchen ideas

So today I'm home from work due to this lovely pollen-induced crud that's been going around. I'm not complaining about spring finally getting here, but the sickness the accompanies it for me each year is never fun. At any rate, a day at home in bed trying to recover has given me ample time to plan future projects. Primarily, I've been looking up kitchen ideas. We have much to get done around here before I start on the kitchen of course, but it always helps me to start my ideas, because I'm not exactly a decisive person, so I'm sure it will take some time for me to decide what I really end up doing.

To start with, the kitchen currently looks like this:


Not attractive. The scallop soffit on the cabinets, is quite possibly, the worst thing I've ever seen from a decorating standpoint. Maybe at one point in 1964 it was really "in" but I'm pretty certain it went "out" the next year and no one ever thought about updating it after that. We do love our old stove though. It has double ovens and works perfectly, so ideas for what to do around it as well as the other white appliances have helped guide our kitchen ideas. And don't worry, the brown stove hood will be painted in the near future to at least match the white.

There will be a fair amount of work involved with the kitchen, but right now we're thinking green cabinets...I know it sounds intense, but we live in a farmhouse cottage, so green just fits. I've found some green that I like, but I'm really not wanting people to walk in and think "green", so something more subtle than these is what we'll likely go with:





Aren't they darling? I'll keep an update for what we finally decide to do and when we we get started.

New Old Stuff

One of the goals of this whole house project is to find "new" things as frugally as possible. This includes re-purposing existing items found in the house, finding family left-overs that we can re-make our own, doing numerous (alright most) fix-up projects ourselves, or doing something new the most cost-efficient way possible. Pretty much, we are newlyweds on a very tight budget, but I still like things to be nice gosh darn it, so I will do everything possible to make them that way!

That's why, in the past week, I've had two gem finds. They don't happen often because if we've learned anything with this old house, it's that boards settle, wiring goes out, and nothing is EVER as simple as you expect it to be. First, I found a NEW chair at none other than Marshall's, and even talked $10 off the price for little scratch on the front. I have to give my sister credit for finding the chair, but a new find is a new find, and considering this same style chair is selling at Rooms To Go for $300, I consider it a STEAL at $110.


The second gem find was through my aunt. I actually picked this up over three years ago when my aunt cleaned out an old storage unit filled with antiques that I plundered through and snatched items from because I liked the style or lines. Of course, being a wee college Senior at the time with no storage room, my parents held onto these items until I could find a suitable place for them. However, with the house approaching near-complete rooms, I recently decided to look over my "finds" and see what could be used. Several of the items are the subject of future posts, but my favorite was this:


My other blog-savvy aunt, who squealed with excitement over rediscovering it with me, described it as an old sugar chest. Through some research and mainly my blog-savvy aunt, I've discovered that a sugar chest was used in families to lock and store their sugar supply because it was such a prized commodity. In fact, the sugar chest is really a unique Southern form of furniture due to the old plantation culture in the South, and the status symbol with keeping sugar. Well sign me up for that! Naturally, this one isn't a really high-class sugar chest, but it's one nonetheless. With a little cleaning, it is ready to go in the living room, and I paid $0. I might even call this a diamond find.

What are people thinking?

Today was day 1 of finishing the hardwood floors in our house. It has taken quite some time to get to day 1, so we'll start at the beginning of this floor story, way back in December.

When we first moved into our house, the floors looked like this:


Super attractive. Hubby described it as "Sunday school classroom carpet", only in a lovely shade of mauve that I'm pretty sure they stopped selling in 1987. So after prodding around the edges of the room, we saw promising glimpses of hardwood floors and we, well mainly I, made the executive decision that Sunday school carpet was coming up. Hardwood floors couldn't be that difficult to do.

Little did I know what awaited us. With surprisingly little effort, up came the carpet and padding, only to reveal the biggest mess either of us had ever seen on a floor.


Yes, along with the normal tack strips and staples, the carpet padding had been held in place by tar. TAR. Who ever thinks "tar on a hardwood floor is a brilliant idea"?? So we went to work with every idea people threw at us to remove each little patch of tar. We scraped, Windexed, scraped, Orange-glowed, scraped, glue-goned, scraped, paint-thinned, and scraped a little more with very little result. I suppose my father either felt really sorry for us or was tired of the complaints that lasted at least a week, and rented the fancy drum sander to take off the tar. It did the trick and in one 20-grit pass, our floors went from tar-central to remotely normal looking.


We were amazed. We admired the floors and thought that surely there couldn't be that much more sanding to get done, in the back of our minds knowing that every time we'd thought that, we were normally very wrong. Unfortunately, the floor work had to take a back-burner to many other projects, the future topics of many posts to come, and after about 6 weeks, we decided it was time to get the floor work going again. So off hubby went to trusty Arrow rentals for 2 sanders and at least 60 sheets of sandpaper to get our floors in tip-top shape, after of course getting a long lecture from my father about how to properly sand a floor. The dust literally flew everywhere, but hubby worked diligently through it (the haze in the picture is the flash reflecting off the dust).


That was a week ago. Hubby has spent all that time trying to get all the aforementioned dust off the floor and out of the room, cleaning the floors at least twice a day with nearly every cleaning product imaginable. But, after many weeks of waiting, he completed day 1 of polyurethane-ing today, and was so proud he emailed a picture to me.


We of course still have re-sanding the floor between each of the two additional coats that will have to be put on the floor, but the end is possibly in sight. So much for a simple, easy project.

Laundry Woes

I have a problem, and it's a problem I've had for a long time. I admit, I tend to be a messy person. My mother claims college brought this out in me, but she secretly knows--and under her breath occasionally admits--that I've always been messy and only living under her roof for 18 years kept me tidy for about 10 of those years. She is probably the perfect example of tidy living, so its not that I don't know how to be tidy, I just choose not to do it. This being said, being messy does not equal less stress in my life, in fact, it equals more. Being messy is why a fraction of our pile of unpacking and laundry yesterday looked like this:



It's bad. Realizing that we had not really unpacked or done laundry--sans underwear and towels people--in 6 weeks because of my travel schedule, renovations, and my husbands lack of laundry knowledge, we tackled the piles, both vowing to never let it get that bad again. That much laundry would make anyone have a panic attack, let alone someone who is attempting to simplify her life. Vowing to avoid this laundry dilemma in the future and actually avoiding it are totally different items, but realizing that we actually had to put off renovating just to handle the laundry made me realize that my messy lifestyle needs a major makeover. So from this time forward I truly vow to never, NEVER, NEVER, let my laundry get that bad again. We'll call it the first part of life simplification, or perhaps that I never really want to do 8 loads of laundry in one day again.

Less Stress

At dinner this evening with my sister, she explained that in one of her management mumbo-jumbo college books they had recently studied how stress can affect people. There was some magical chart that evaluated your impact from stress based on current life events and circumstances, and that depending on where your stress registered on the chart dictated you or your employees overall health condition and productivity. Common top stresses included various marriage issues, job changes, moving, illness, having children, etc... Since I had experienced most of the top stresses on her list, excluding illness and having children, she decided to evaluate where my current stress level was, and on a scale of 300, I scored a whopping 250. Apparently at a 200 level you run the higher risk of developing a serious illness (which I am still trying to avoid, I'm thinking this is not something you would like a perfect score in). Aside from my new job, new town, and new marriage, my husband and I decided in young ambition to "fix-up" our "new" old house, meaning our lives have become slightly consumed with renovating a 100 year old house. While this amount of stress would worry most, we recently found a quote from Dr. Hans Selye that makes this whole journey a little easier:

“Man should not try to avoid stress any more than he would shun food, love or exercise.”

So, at the poking and prodding of many--ok maybe just a few--I am venturing back into the world of blogging. We'll consider it a little glimpse into the attempts of de-stressing and simplifying my life since it is obvious that needs to happen, with a focus on how our home renovations seem to only add to these stresses (maybe once we finish it will make things simpler?). I approach it all like this--a home, like your life, is only as strong as the foundation, and since those two seem so co-mingled in my life right now as my husband and I start many new ventures, I find it only fitting for the blog to reflect this...we'll see where the construction takes us.