Renovation Surprises

Some say that it is easier to build a house than to renovate because when you renovate you have to live in the mess. Mr. G and I have been living in the mess for about 2 months now and we must admit it is starting to get a bit old. However, we know that each day we are closer to a new home and it is very exciting. We have been working on many things since the last time I blogged about our renovation so there are lots of pictures to keep you up to date.
We had a combination of laminate and carpet through out the house. We decided to go with all new floors since the carpet had been stained by the previous owners dog and also our two dogs. We liked the laminate but there wasn't enough of it and it would be impossible to find the exact match to do the whole house in. Instead we opted to put Vertigo, a new type of flooring that is not wood and is not laminate but looks like real hardwood, through out the house with the exception of the bathrooms and the bedrooms. We are putting new carpet in the bedrooms and leaving the bathrooms as is.

Here is my dad taking up the laminate in our entry way. We were blessed that our laminate came up easily and we will be able to sale it at our upcoming rummage sale. Anytime we are presented with a pleasant surprise we get pretty excited because most of the time our surprises have been time consuming and expensive.

It easily snapped out of place. It was a dream....unfortunately, we didn't have the best of luck with the other floors.

Here we took up the carpet in the dining room and it wasn't too bad. Apparently, the people who laid the carpet felt like a million staples and nails were needed, but we were able to get it all up by the end of the day.

The next day we took up the carpet in the living room and we were surprised to find that there had been some water stains. Our first thought is that our particle board is damaged and that we are going to have to replace it.

You can see some more of the water damage by our fireplace. The floor was so dark at places that it actually had looked like the floor had been on fire at some point in the past. Fortunately, the particle board is actually perfectly solid. It is not loose or soft anywhere so we don't have to worry about replacing it. Praise God.

And on to more surprises. We took the laminate up easily in the kitchen only to find that there were not one, but two more floors underneath it. Isn't that a beautiful yellow linoleum. Unfortunately, it doesn't really go with our style of decorating.

We knew that it would be difficult to pull up the two floors but we had no idea that it would be this difficult. The top lay of linoleum laid on top of a board that had nails placed every 6 inches. We called many people asking for advice on how to get this floor up and the last guy we called said it best. "Blood, sweat, and tears." We started hitting the floor as hard as we could with this scrapper. This actually would cause the nails to bend over far enough so that we could lift pieces of the floor up. Then we would have to go back and pull up all the bent over nails so that our scrapper wouldn't get snagged on it and rip off our shoulder. It took us an entire day to get that first layer off and it was miserable. My poor Dad did most of the work and he has a wonderful blister on his hand to prove it.

And once again that lovely brown does not match our decor....bummer.

I helped some but I wasn't near as good at whacking the floor like dad was.

Then came the toughest road block of all. This bottom layer had been glued on and no matter how hard we whacked it, it only came off in small pieces. Mr. G told dad and I that since we did the top two layers he would do the bottom layer, but it is a hard and tedious job. And unfortunately, he isn't done with it yet. He has been working on it for days and we are maybe 2/3 of the way done. Poor guy.

The next day dad and I tackled the big window in our living room. We are changing the wood work in our house to white so we needed to paint the front window to match. It took an entire day but it was actually pretty fun. I put on my DVD of Gilmore Girls and dad and I painted to the sound of Lorelei and Rory's random pop culture references and fast talking. It was wonderful.

More painting and it looks like you can see Rory on our smile tv to my right. Oh, and it also appears to be another beautiful summer day outside.

There is still much to be done and not a lot of time before school starts. The count down on the gas station before you enter our village says 24 days till school starts. However, it has said 24 days till schools starts for 5 days, so I am not for sure what that means. At least they spelled school right this time.