Never Cover Your Lovely Wood Floors.

Today has been a messy day for Rick and I.
We found a chemical remover that works for our furry dinning room floor! Some genius thought to glue carpet onto the hardwood floor in our dinning room. Then they pulled it up and left behind a polyester chinchilla of a floor. Nothing was getting this glue and fur off. Until we splurged and bought a jug of this stuff.

Okay, it's not allowed in almost a dozen states, and mother earth isn't very thrilled with us on this. But, we are soooooooooo thrilled with the outcome of this gloop!  It got rid of the fur! 

 HOLY CRAP! AMAZING!

We tried the old get gum out of hair trick, by putting ice on it, we tried just mopping it, leaving wet towels on it, scrubbing, combing, sweating on it, mineral spirits and unleashing my mother to try and solve this furry mess.

 Nada. Zilch. Zip. 

But long at last we will soon see our dinning room floor! 

Klean-Strip has been helping us remove nasty, likely 20+ year old linoleum tiles. It's another, what in the world were these people thinking? In one of the bedrooms, which is going to be my room, office, sewing room, homework, and spending too much money on amazon.com room, someone decided to lay laminate flooring in the corner of the room over the wood floor. The tiles only covered about one third of the room. When I get to a point of posting a before and after picture of the room, you'll see exactly what I mean. 

Another genius thought it was a great idea to lay down this linoleum with tar for a glue. 

WORSE IDEA EVER.

1. scrap, crack, peel and pop off tiles

2. tug out dozens of random staples from the floor.

3.  rip out some of the floor boards to get the rest of the tile, and random carpet

4. cover in the remover. wait.

5. scrape off gunk round one.

6. cover the same spot with the remover again. wait.

7. scrape off gunk again, mostly tar.

8. wipe down with mineral spirits.

9. say, "whoa!" then sigh, when you only got 2 tiles gone and about 30 more to go.

I was and still sort of am ready to accept defeat and buy some Pergo flooring to cover this all up. But, I really love to say, we have all original wood floors!

Another wonderful thing we learned the hard way was... when a bottle full of chemicals says to wear chemical resistant gloves and clothing, do so. The Klean-Strip stuff isn't a bottle of nail polish remover it's some very serious magic chemical. Within seconds of getting some gloop on your skin you find yourself jumping up and running to the closest sink you can get to. It very literally will burn your skin. Rick and I both have new wounds on our hands from where our gloves didn't cover our knuckles and we got some on our skin for too long. 

But, maybe, just maybe it's worth all of the pain.

I gotta admit, I'm quite impressed. 

So, moral of the story, don't screw with your beautiful, equity making wood floors. 

Let me introduce you to the sledge hammer.

Knocking walls down seem to be Rick and I's new favorite past time. There is this amazing, yet strange sense of satisfaction when you start ripping off chunks of dry wall and throwing a sledge hammer into a  two by four to loosen out a nail.

This house was owned by Jackson County Department of Disabilities. There were a few people, I'd say atleast six adults with various disabilities who shared this house together. So for whatever reason there are many strange alterations.

One of the first eye sore, alterations, my dad found. Thanks Dad! On the third floor, you walk up a twisty, narrow staircase, which, at the top is surrounded by a wood railing. Butt up right next to this railing was this awful wood paneling wall.

Sick.

This became my first demolition project!

We think maybe the wall was put up to divide an apartment, there's a kitchenette on the third floor. Or, it was put in for some kind of fire safety reason.

Looking back at this I wish that all demolitions of walls were like this.

No drywall! Holy Moly! Dry wall is such a mess! Dust in your hair, dust on your clothes, dust all over the floor, dust in my lungs, dust in my eyes, dust in all of the rooms near by! You come out of a drywall knock out looking like the bride of frankenstein! Not only is there dust there's all the crumbles of plaster laying around and bigger sheets.
So with this wall, it was just wood paneling, two by fours and a door frame. Yahoo!

My second favorite part of this project was Rick and I's ingenuity/laziness. We can't fit anything bigger than a full size mattress up these stairs, so thinking about successfully trying to bring all the wall remains down them, really wasn't looking like an enjoyable adventure. Thankfully, the third floor windows open! Pop off a screen and bon voyage scrap! It's not every day you get to javelin throw a two by four out of your third floor window!

Luckily in a week, our neighborhood is having a dumpster day. Our mountain of building remnants is growing quite high.

Oh, and don't worry! We are saving the good stuff to donate to Habit for Humanity Restore!

Something I've learned is the necessity to wear gloves!
Go buy them!
Feel empowered by them!
Feel smart while you wear them!
Rick and I would likely be in a lot less pain if we would have done this from the get go. You don't really feel like you're roughing up your hands too much until, you go and wash them, or look down and realize two of your knuckles are bleeding. It's worth the investment to get a good pair. Twenty bucks on some thick gloves is a hell of a lot better than hundreds of dollars in emergency room bills to get a rusty nail taken out of your hand and a nasty tetanus shot in your arm or ass.


I almost forgot! The after picture! Ohh! Aww! So much room! So wonderful and open!

Our first nights.

Our first nights, well more like our first two weeks we found ourselves camping out in the living room on a mattress on the floor. It was fun, but it still wasn't a bedroom! This quickly made us decide to make our bedroom the first priority to accomplish. 

We went on a Nebraska Furniture Mart spending spree! 
We picked out this amazing kick ass beautiful oak bedroom set. It had hidden doors and drawers in all the different pieces. Laying on the bed in the middle of the Mart made you forget there was a mustached middle aged man, trying to convince us to buy every warranty on everything.  We anxiously waited the two weeks for the big ol' truck to roll up. The moving guys came into see what kind of obstacles they were going to need to tackle. By this point we had figured out how the whole house was going to be set up, we had decided to make the whole third floor into a super master suite. Rick had me up my cute girl act and tucked $100 bucks in my back pocket to try and bribe the guys to get all the stuff up to the third floor. These dudes, took one look at the 3rd floor stairs and told us no way no how, unless we sign a contract making them free and clear of any damages they make to our house and the furniture.

This is when I began to pout and try to understand that this borderline royal barbie dreamhouse bedroom set was not going to happen. The movers explained that an option was to knock out windows and get a cherry picker and bring it all in though the windows. We've been planning on getting new windows, but just not that soon. So they hauled all of the furniture into our garage to sit and think about what we were going to do.
It took us about 6 hours to realize a few things. 
1. Renting a cherry picker and movers to get this stuff through third floor windows was going to add even more money to this adventure.
2. We spent ALOT of money on this stuff.
3. Our bedroom was going to be all the way up on the third floor. People can't look up from the entry way and see the third floor, all they can see is the second floor rooms. 
4. Why the hell should we have super fancy furniture for no one to see?

So, a phone call two days later, we set up a day for them to pick everything up and send it back to the warehouse and refund us. A couple of days later, we had an empty garage, a truck bed of lumber, new mattresses delivered and a brand new fridge!  All for less than a third of the cost of the original bedroom set. 

We can't fit any mattress up the third floor stairs larger than a full size, which was a bit of a squeeze. So we bought a twin and a full size mattress, made our own bed frame and eventually make our own headboard and find equally as cool and cheap nightstands. (IKEA?)

Also, if you ever find yourself at Nebraska Furniture Mart, put your blinders on and walk with your head down straight to the 'knick, dent, and scratched' department. About 90% of my NFM furniture is from there and I can't find what is wrong with it! We headed over to the appliance dent and scratched section and found an AWESOME fridge for a grand less than original asking price because there are two little dent's. One on the side of the door and one on the lower right side of the door. SOLD. 

I just had to convince this set of movers to take off the doors and let me rip out part of a door frame to get it into the kitchen. 

Now the fun starts, the sledge hammer is introduced to me. 

-Allie 

Hola Friends! 

After the long, long wait for internet we have it! 

This blog is all about our experiences rehabbing this old house! 

Hopefully you learn something, while we learn how to do things too!

Plus, my beloved Starbucks friends and I can keep touch!

 Oh, yeah, this blog will be going through some rehabbing itself!