Discovering Wood Floors

I got the office painted my neutral off white color that the rest of the house has been painted so far. My poor children thought I had gone round the bend, since we usually paint every room in our house a different bright color. I had to have something neutral in this house though for the time being to cover that SALMON color. I do not know how this house will feel in the long winter months here. Winter is 6 months of snow here. Lots of snow. We will probably repaint after I get a feeling for how it feels to live here in all seasons.

After the walls were done I skipped the ceiling (I may regret that later) and went straight after the laminate covering the wood floors.


I could not believe how incredibly dirty these were! The drywall mud and paint I can kinda of understand but what the heck is that dirt layer?

I read this article last week about how to clean wood dressers and I thought the same thing would work on my wood floors.


I was impressed with the results. I did use some Lemon Oil for the last step for this area but quickly rethought my process.


I wondered if I shouldn't opt to put a layer of water based poly finish on it after it is all clean up to protect it until the future floor sanding process. That is many years down the road. So I opted to skip the Lemon Oil on the rest of the floor.

Here's what I did:


Using my scrub brush and a bucket of water with Murphy's Oil Soap I scrubbed and scrubbed the floor.


This area seems to have been painted with drywall mud, really??? I had to get my mud knife out and scrape the mud off. It worked better to scrub the floor first and get it wet, then it came right off.



After it was mostly cleaned up I dried the floor. You don't want the floor to be wet to long. I then went over the floor with 0000 steel wool going with the grain of the wood. This not only cleaned the stuff left behind but buffed out the floor also. I should have used 00 steel wool since the floors were so badly damaged but I only had 0000 handy. I then wiped up the floor again.


We have the finished product. It looks great and I can work around the furniture in the room doing small sections at a time. It will take lots of time however but virtually free since I already had all the supplies. And believe me, old wood floors with marks, and scratches beat laminate any day!

{this moment}

{this moment} - A Friday ritual. A single photo - no words - capturing a moment from the week. A simple, special, extraordinary moment. A moment I want to pause, savor and remember. Inspired by Soulemama

More New House Tour

Bedrooms:
What will be our Master Bedroom


We wanted to have our bedroom on the main level and leave the top floor a kid only floor. So we had the choice of the "office" which doesn't have a door or a light, but does have the bathroom in it. Our other choice is this bedroom right off the kitchen. It's about the same size, has no overhead light but does have a light switch with a plug that is attached. It is pink. Normally I would say that pink is my least favorite color, but that salmon color is way worse.

Upstairs we have the kids:
The Youngest


This is the only bedroom with original moldings. Love them.

The Oldest

This room will be for my oldest, however we have to put the wall back together where they opened it up to make a suite.


The daughter's new room is the back room. The room in the foreground will be the Oldest's room. Her room used to open into the hallway upstairs by the bathroom but they put a wall up and made a closet there. We will be tearing that down and making it her doorway again.

Entryway

We've got most of the entry painted. We pulled up the carpet and they had painted the wood floors an ugly beige. This really wouldn't have been a horrible, terrible thing except...they didn't sand the floor first and there was enough gloss to the floor that the paint isn't sticking. This means I can't paint right over it.



My daughter had a great idea. She exclaimed that the light was not to ugly, that we could just spray paint the base a aged bronze color. So we took down the light cover and found the bulb was half black. Not a good sign. I'm afraid that light is past it's prime and needs replaced.

Last Lake Day?

Fall begins...

Our New House

We moved to the UP. We are now Yoopers. We are so excited, not only that we get to see nature, daily! But the outdoors here is part of life. There are bike lanes all over the town, hiking/crosscountry skiing trails, a downhill ski hill across the canal. And the Canal! Oh My, I am in love. Everyday the canal looks different. It's a different color, the water is calm, it is choppy, it is coming from one direction or the other, but it is never the same. I supposed that will change this winter when it's just ice but I don't know if that will change how I feel about it.

Our favorite thing is it's a 15 minute drive from Lake Superior. It feels like the Ocean only colder and much cleaner.

We found our new house on a whirlwind trip around the two towns here looking at 9 houses in two hours. We knew we wanted four bedrooms and at least two bathrooms so that limited our house choices. We also wanted an older home that needed a little love. That part is not hard to find since most of the homes in the area were built during the mining boom from 1900 to 1925. We saw a couple that would work but we all voted and this was the winner.



I would love to say that the empty lot is ours and I will be gardening in it, but it is the neighboors. We do have about a four foot sliver along the drive that I hope to put some raised beds in next spring.





I love having an entryway. We have already figured out however that we believe it opened into the office and the closet is not original.



The Salmon Color has got to go though! And it is everywhere, not just the entryway.



Also in the Dining room, and the Living room,


and the office



So our first order of business is to get rid of this orangy salmon color. This color makes me feel so cranky!

Today I Ignore the bathrooms!

That's right I am going to Ignore the bathrooms today and work on getting rid of the Salmon Color. Eww. We have already gotten it out of the living room, and dining room. It is still in the entryway and the office.



I hope to get it done today. Then we can go back to trying to figure out the bathrooms.

Oops I started demo on two bathrooms

Really I didn't mean to.


I just wanted to caulk the shower doors because water was leaking out of them. I noticed that the wall looked wet. I explored them and they were, very wet. So I quickly cut off all the wet drywall, then noticed the water had gone down to the floor. We knew from last weeks adventure of uncovering the wood floors that were probably wood floors under this cheap laminate so I pull up the first board.



The floors were still good, but the laminate was very wet with mold starting to form underneath it. This was when I called for back up. My husband came in said to pull it up. We got up the area around the shower but left it under the toilet and sink. I'm not ready for that kind of work yet, I'm still trying to get rid of the salmon color!


Fast forward a few days. I got the shower downstairs caulked and ready to use so I moved upstairs as I noticed they did a bad job caulking those tub doors and it was leaking too. Unfortunately it was worse. Much worse. I got to cutting off the drywall after heading to the store for a respirator. I got all the wet drywall off and found they tiled over drywall, and some of it was wet.


So the problem is what do we do? We know that the tile and the wet drywall has to go. So we need a new surround. Do we do the easy route and buy a surround kit? We've never gone the easy route before.


Do we buy a new tub? This one is rusted. If we have the whole thing out why not do the floors which have a 1 inch layer of build up on them. If we do the floors what would we use and will it tie in with the rest of the upstairs.



What do we do with this? I can see it getting water damage and needing to pull it down later if we keep it. It was painted shut when we moved it. I have since unstuck it but have no idea what I would keep in it.

So as you can see we have a lot to think about this weekend. By the Way my Love started his new job with an orientation all week this week and next week starts full time. This was NOT in the plan.

Garden in the rain

It's been raining here like every three days, which is why I haven't gotten that fence stained yet. The garden however is in heaven and I was wishing I had about four more garden beds. Here's my lovely green beans:

And we have the largest tomato, can't wait to eat that one:

And the garden as a whole.

Lego was fun.... traffic not so much

We made it to the Lego store! Yippee for us!

They had an area set up in the mall for kids to build a big block to help make the 8 foot tall R2D2. They had just started it when we were there.


Robert misses his bug...

Tman enjoyed all the displays.

This was the pick a brick wall. You get a cup and you get to fill it up with bricks from the wall. Here Tman is trying to figure out exactly what bricks he needs the most. It took quite some time to try to get them all in the cup and in the end we had to put some back despite having read some tutorials on how to pack a pick a brick cup.

So the way home we were trucking along and then hit.... traffic. I hate traffic. It is the one thing I hate about living in a huge metroplex, and it is that reason that I try never to go far from home unless I can return around 3pm. We were on the way home at 4. We sat for quite a while. Finally when we got close enough to our part of town we pull off the highway, all car sick from the stop and go, and me with a splitting headache. I was lucky enough to be driving, if I had been a passenger I would have gotten sick. W fell asleep before we hit the stalled and stop and go traffic and that was great cause he is the most car sick of all of us.

We are happy!

Things are looking good here in Scatterville. Summer is blooming, the tomatoes are huge already with six or so little green ones already. I think this year I am going to regret planting 22 tomatoes, but after last years failure of the six I did plant I was not going to take any chances.

We got an offer on the old Scatterville, and I have held off posting about it because I did not want to jinx it. We accepted, they did the inspection. They wanted a few little things done, and we said yes. We will close on the 1st of June. We will no longer be the home owners of two homes. The feeling of future relief is amazing, however we are still holding our breathe and won't believe it's a done deal until all the forms have been signed.

So what do you get when you go ice skating with friends? Balloons. See how well W's Balloon is behaving? He was so excited about it's good behavior, he wanted to take it's picture. They were both so serious in this picture.





Then, THE BROTHER, appears and jumps into the scene without asking flailing limbs, causing the worst day EVER!






The kids have already planned some adventures with the proceeds of the house sale, like finishing the tree house deck, getting a bigger swimming pool, and going to Disney World. My plans include paying off massive amount of debt that have accumulated during the whole period of not living in the old scatterville, yet still paying to fix it up. That will feel nice to not be carrying anymore too.

Today we will be heading over to the new Lego Store Grand Opening and filling a cup from the pick a brick wall. I'll let you know how that goes.