Re-finishing Our Floors (our beautiful, beautiful floors!)

Before we started the whole process of re-finishing these floors, I thought that the steps seemed easy enough.Ya know…

-rip up the carpet and tack-stripping

-rent sander and sand floors

-stain

-polyurethane

EASY? Right?.... ehhhh… not so much. I mean those are the steps we followed for the most part. But reading those words online and actually doing them are very different things. Also, we had a few extra steps to take once we saw what was underneath of the carpet.

So… Step # 1:

Not even an hour after we were inside of the house after our closing… things started looking like this:

Ripping up all of the carpet was the easiest step.We hit our first speed bump, however, when we pulled back the carpet padding and saw this:

There were patches of white paint all over the living room and the dining room! The bedrooms, luckily, didn't have any paint but we did have a new problem to deal with first before we could sand! We went through a bit of trial and error about how we should get the paint up, we first tried just using a putty knife to scrape up the paint, as seen here:

This method worked... but took WAY too much time. We knew we needed something to help get the paint up more quickly. So then we used some Goo Gone & the putty knife, and had slightly better results... ummmm... sort of... 

Did I mention that Goo Gone smells awful? 

It still was taking WAY too long... we had so many paint spots to get up. If ONLY they made some kind of product specifically for getting up paint off of a surface... you know like some sort of paint... remover or something? Oh yeah... that does exist... why didn't we think of it in the first place?

So... we finally just bought some paint remover, followed the directions on the label and and most of the paint ended up coming up easily with a putty knife.

The life-saving paint remover! :D

Oh... and for about five minutes during that trial and error period, we thought we could use a hand sander to get the paint up... which resulted in this gem:

Anyway... after we got the paint up, things started looking like this:

Turns out the paint was covering "dark spots" on the floor. Our assumption is that these had been caused by pet urine, and they painted over them to "seal" out the smell when they put carpet down. We weren't too worried about the spots because we still had to sand... and we were planning to stain darker so we knew they wouldn't show up very much in the end.

 Then Zach went around and ripped up all of the tack stripping around the edges of the rooms:

We just threw all of the carpet and padding out onto the front porch, and gave it all away for free to a neighbor a couple of days later.

Then we rented a vibrating floor sander from The Home Depot, and we thought things were going to go much more quickly. Wrong again. Turns out, we should have rented a drum sander… but we didn't do this because most things that we read online warned against them, they said that we could quickly and easily ruin our floors if we didn't know what we were doing. Since we didn't know what we were doing we played it safe and got the less-intense vibrating sander.

But after spending over 3 hours in our smallest room and being NO WHERE near close to done, we decided if we wanted our floors done in less than 3 months we needed more power.

I had to go to work that day just before the drum sander was rented… but I got updates all night, and things obviously were going much better (and faster!) I’m told they did 3 passes in each room with the drum sander, with 3 different grits of sandpaper. Then they used hand-sanders to get the edges of the rooms.By the time I saw my floors again they looked like this:

The next day, my dad came over and he and Zach spent  Sunday afternoon working their tails off sweeping up all of the dust… and there was lots of dust.

LOTS of dust:

Then they started staining… and by the time they finished… things were starting to look BEAUTIFUL!

We had to wait about two days for the stain to dry and then we put on the first coat of polyurethane. The polyurethane just further beautified the floors, so shiny! 

We wanted to put 3 coats of poly on but due to time constraints (we had to be out of our apartment on the 30^th), we didn’t have time, so we ended up with two. We still plan on going back and putting a third coat on at some point… but two is fine, we just wanted the extra coat of protection to be safe!

So there ya’ have it. Our beautiful, beautiful floors…  Hope you like them… but you can’t have them… they’re mine… and we’re going to be together forever.

Homeownin’ It Up!

 So I know it has been awhile… but buying the house, on top of packing and moving - and unpacking- and cleaning and painting and more cleaning … all while still keeping up my day job, is EXHAUSTING. It has been like what I think jet-lag would feel like… house-lag! The good news is I feel great now… and I’m back with some house postings to let you know what we've been up to.

This post will just be a general post about what the house is looking like now that we’re here… but I will be back later this week hopefully with some detailed posts about some of the improvements we made. (namely--- the beautiful, glorious hardwood floors).

So after two days of moving everything into the new house from the apartment… and then about another two days of unpacking… this is what all of the rooms are looking like now:

LIVING ROOM

All of these pics were taken on my phone... forgive the quality!

  

Obviously this is before we got rid of the pile of empty boxes and trash. :)

We still need to:

-get 2 bookcases so that we can unpack our two very large boxes of books

- “new” media console for TV, with storage for DVD’s (by “new” I mean new to us... most likely we’ll find something at a flea market)  

-get a sectional

-new curtains

-rugs

-coffee table (something round I think)

-hang some family pics? Or maybe some art? Both?

DINING ROOM

We still need to:

-get a new larger dining room table with seating for at least 6 people

-convert storage console into open shelving & paint or stain

-eventually replace countertop on storage console

-find/hang some art on the open wall

OFFICE/MUSIC ROOM

Probably one of my favorite parts... having an organized area for my crafts and art stuff!

This is probably our most completed room so far.. I'm loving the way the guitars look up on the wall... they're beautiful. BUT...We still need to:

-move futon in here once we purchase a sectional

-get a different desk chair

-need a rug (probably something round)

BEDROOM

-would like to get a large rug for underneath the bed

-also want to look into vintage metal bedframe

-new bedding set?

-hang some art on the walls

BATHROOM

-paint the walls (SOMETHING CHECKED OFF OF MY LIST!!! although not in this picture)

-hang shelves with baskets on wall for extra storage

-create an outlet in here ( yup… I have no outlet in my bathroom right now… it’s very inconvenient)

-

KITCHEN

-paint chalkboard wall (TWO things checked off of my lists! you can't see the wall i painted here either... I will back with that update later!)

-black and white checkerboard floors (vinyl tiles)

-paint or stain cabinets

-new cabinet hardware

Nothing has happened in the basement except that we moved a few boxes down there, so I won’t bore you with basement pictures. We do have plans to waterproof the basement, but not right away.

We also bought our first lawn mower, and the yard is starting to look a lot better! Zach is in charge of that department, so I really have no idea what he has in store out there…

This is actually back behind the garage... Zach mowed and cleaned up a bunch of trash back here... but we still need to get gravel!

And happily, the cats are in love with the new house too… lots more space for them to play in now! (although they mostly sleep in the window.)

WE OWN A HOME!

So... lots and lots has been going on . We officially closed on the house on Monday at 2:30 pm.... and as soon as the keys were in our hands we were there, and getting our hands dirty ripping up the carpet! We are hoping to have the floors finished by this time next week... and I will be sure to post about all of it for you when they are looking beautiful!

But for now... here is just a short and sweet post to say WE OWN A HOME NOW!!!!!!!

(aaaand we're hard at work!)

Lots of carpet ripped up... that was gladly hauled away for free by a neighbor this morning!

And then my sweet husband took this gem:

And with that... I leave you... 

Go, Fight, Gryffindor!

It is no secret that I am a bit of a Harry Potter nerd. So when my (at the time) 11 year old brother-in-law (and all around, most amazing kid I know), started reading the series... it brought proud little tears of joy to my eye. Ok... maybe that's an exaggeration... I didn't cry... but I was super happy. Every time I saw him we'd discuss what book/chapter he was on, and when he'd tell me, I'd look at him all knowing like and say... "oooh just wait... there is some really good stuff coming up soon!" (as if there is any part of the Harry Potter book that is not "really good stuff").

Noah (my bro-in-law fo' life) is also a pretty imaginative kid, so when we decided to make this present we wanted to go all out and give him tons of stuff to interact with. So this is the story... all about how (this is where the fresh-prince sing along stops), we made a Gryffindor writing box, complete with homemade quills, DIY coffee-stained rolls of parchment, and even a version of the Maurauder's map!

 

The box was just an unstained box that we got from the wood section at the craft store Before staining, Zach drew the Gryffindor flag on there the way he wanted and then used our wood burner to put it on the box, he did the outlines of the red and yellow flag, as well as all of the letters this way. 

We then stained the entire box. Then with Acrylic red & gold paint we painted the Gryffindor emblem. Fairly straight-forward and simple.... the inside was a bit more complicated.

For the top of the lid and the bottom of the compartment, we used felt paper (not sure if it's called paper?), but these can be bought at just about any craft store... the top was a brown textured piece that we liked, the bottom is cut out patches of red & gold. It took us awhile to figure this inside part out and get the felt cut to the correct (& precise) dimensions, but after we did, we just glued everything in. I think that some of these felt pieces can be purchased with an adhesive backing... which would make this even easier.

Here is the box without all of the stuff, so you can see how we arranged the felt.

Then we obviously thought it would be super-magical to attach a mirror to the lid.. so we also just glued that in place. While we were making this present we had to split the projects up, Zach pretty much did everything for the box on his own, he may have asked for my input now and again, but he did all of the felt-cutting, wood-burning and staining, etc. Ain't he something special, my hubby? 

I was in charge of the contents of the box. I knew I wanted rolls of parchment, some quills, and after seeing/ downloading this homemade Maurauder's map, I decided to include those as well. 

The rolls of parchment were probably one of the first things I made... I had some leftover paper (nice slightly textured drawing or painting paper), it was in about an 18 x 24 sheet. I cut this down into 2 or 3 various sizes of parchment. Then I brewed some coffee. 

This was not coffee to drink (though I suppose you could). I poured the coffee into a large rectangular tupper-ware container. Then one by one I put the cut pieces of paper in there and let them soak. The darker your coffee brew, and the longer the soaking time will all effect the end results, so if you ever do this, it's worth it to experiments. You can also drop ink on the paper before you put it in the coffee-stain, for a bit of a messy/blotted look.If the paper is thick/strong enough you can even crumple it up while it's wet to creat a bit of texture. You can see one in the photo above that I did this to. 

After you take the paper out of the stain lay it flat on a counter top... or drying rack... and let it dry. You can use paper towels to soak up some excess moisture... but I wouldn't let it dry on them.. they might end up stick together. You could probably leave them to dry on top of dish towels without any issues.

After the paper was dry... I burned some of the edges (for extra magical effect), then I just rolled them up and loosely tied them with some twine.

Then I decided to make my own quills. I don't really care to give a tutorial on this... because, while I think that my quills looks ok.. I don't think they work in the way that a quill actually should. Ideally a feather quill holds in some excess ink for you while you write... my quills... well they just left you with ink-y fingers. However, they were good enough for an 11 year old boy!

Basically I attached some old writing nibs that I had lying around (don't ask me why these were lying around... you accumulate weird things in art school), to the end of the feathers with glue, and then I used strips of the coffee- stained paper and wrapped & glued those around the base of the feathers and over the glued ends of the nibs for some extra stability.

For the Maurauder's map, I can't even really explain what I did. I download the map that I linked to above, but I opened it in photoshop and made my map a bit bigger, and I made more rooms in the castle , and added more characters from the books. I did stick to the basic folding instructions from the original link, but they had to be modified a bit since I extended the paper size. Anyway... after all of the modifications I made on the computer, then I printed out the map on a piece of coffee stained paper, cut to my appropriate map size, and after much trial and error, I finally got it folded just right!

Here are the pages front and back of my map that I updated... I checked the size in photo-shop and I believe I printed these on 8.5 x 15 in pieces of paper:

This was the front of my map.

Back of my map. 

The original download of the map didn't have a backside... but I am such a nerd... that I HAD to add more rooms. I mean... can you really make a map of Hogwarts and not even have the dormitories for each of the four houses?  Also... a castle needed to have more than one story... so my back side includes a second and third floor of the castle. Which made it more legit... because then I could add Moaning Myrtle's bathroom on the third-floor corridor! Yeah... I have issues. I could have gone on creating the whole castle forever, if my deadline for this project wasn't Christmas. 

I can't figure out how to make these a download for you guys... so if you want to make the map, just contact me and I can send you a full size document so you can print your own!

Then we just threw everything in the box ( along with a bottle of ink), and VOILA! The absolute coolest Christmas present I have ever made!

Complete with Luna (as in Luna Lovegood) in the background. Seriously... I have a Harry Potter obsession... 

Anybody want to hire us to make them a box? We've thought about making them for all four houses... just for fun...