M.I.A. & Back Again- An Update

It's been quite a while since I posted here and boy has A LOT happened since the last post.  I'll start with an update on us.

With working on and getting settled in the house, time flew.  Before we knew it, we were spending our first winter together in our new home.  Christmas was coming, and Sean was excited to show me Philadelphia during Christmas time.  For his birthday, I planned to take him into the city and make a weekend out of it.  We spent Saturday seeing the light shows at the Comcast Center and Macy's, and then enjoyed a yummy dinner at Serpico.  The following morning, we indulged in a traditional Irish breakfast and then hit the Christmas market near LOVE PARK.  Sean asked if I wanted to get a picture in front of the famous LOVE statue, and then he gave me the surprise of my life...

Doing the "prom pose"

Sweet surprise

Of course I said "yes!"  We got engaged on December 22, 2013.  Shortly after, we met with the wedding coordinator at Springfield Country Club where we had agreed was where we wanted our wedding to be held.  We were looking to have either a Spring or Fall ceremony, which everyone else wanted to do as well it seemed!  We had the option to either get married in well over a year or book a surprisingly free Saturday that was available that May...meaning the Saturday in the May that was about four months from that time.  We looked at each other and decided to go for it!  So in a whirlwind four months, we planned our wedding and tied the knot on May 3, 2014.  Here's a snapshot of our day:

 

My dress

Getting ready with my girls

 

Best.Day.Ever.

 

So then we were in our best friends' wedding, honeymooned in Jamaica, had a fun summer, celebrated Halloween, Thanksgiving & Christmas, and rung in the 2015 New Year all while working on the house in between!  And that finally brings us to present day :) 

 

 

Can You Fall in Love with a Floor??

While renovating our home, as I type this, our biggest felt achievement at this point has been our floors.  We pulled out the carpeting in the dining room, living room, up the stairs, and in our landing upstairs.  We were uncertain of what we were going to do with the floors in the bedrooms at this point, so thought this was a good place to start.  As I posted before, it was a project...but one we felt we tackled in a timely manner.  We were going to try to sand and stain the floors ourselves, but after Sean's extensive googling and me asking everyone and their uncle, we decided to outsource an expert.  After all, with the time and energy we put in to uncovering these bad boys, we wanted them to turn out right.  We received a referral and to anyone in the Philly area, we would highly recommend these guys. 

 

Here's what we started with:

 Here's what we did:

And after some stain and a couple stinky coats of polyurethane, this is what we got- and we couldn't be happier:



This first few are just stain, no poly

Can I get an AMEN?!?  We are in love with how they turned out.  We are a little ways away, but can't you see it starting to come together??? 



Plaster Palace

After we spent the weekend ripping out the carpet and taking staples out of our wood floors, we were trying to figure out what the next job should be on the million gazillion "to do" items.  Sean, his dad, and brothers decided to finish the walls.  After the extensive wallpaper craziness, our walls needed to be re-"skimmed" with a wall compound.  There were endless nicks, crannies, and cracks that were uncovered once the wallpaper was gone.  And going at the walls with the hardcore scrapers also took a toll.  The boys had to patch and re-plaster every inch of the walls downstairs, including inside the windows and under the door frames.  Here's some shots to demonstrate what we were dealing with:

It was a dusty, messy job-let me tell you!!  They spent hours running over the walls, letting it dry, and then using their sanding sticks to get everything smooth.  Dry wall dust is an unbelievable thing!  The amount that comes off the walls is unexpected and how the dust spreads is another story (think on top of the toilet seat upstairs).  It was a step by step process and they did a great job.  At this point while being in our house, if you so much as rubbed a knuckle against the walls, you looked like you got hit with baby powder.  However, it was a very important step in getting these walls one step closer to paint!!  We also wanted to get as much of the wall work as we could before we finished the floors.  Getting the carpet and staples out were just a few steps of many in making these babies shine!!



We've Been Floored (And Stapled...)

This is how we woke up the morning after our wallpaper removal:

We decided to sleep on that wonderfully, accommodating air mattress in the middle of our living room floor.  And not gonna lie, it was nice to wake up to non-wallpapered walls.  This was our view:

 

Old curtains aside, the walls look neutral and our floral nightmares have subsided!!  We used this view as the inspiration to start our next day of hard work.  The previous night, after our wallpaper removal & before we inflated the sleeping raft, we did this:

Well actually, we did that as soon as we got the keys...and we also might have done that upstairs in the master bedroom as well.  But needless to say, we looked again just to make sure!  We used our box cutter, sliced into the carpet, and sure enough we saw them...BEAUTIFUL hardwood floors!  Now the full monty condition was not able to be revealed until we ripped the entire thing out, but what we got a peek at was original planks of wonderful that we couldn't wait to get our hands on.  No offense to rose-colored plushness- I get excited when I receive a bouquet of roses too.  But running my toes throughout that rosiness with 40+ years of lived in scent reaching your nose was prime time ready to be retired.  We recruited Sean's hard-working family again and dug our box cutters into the carpet in the downstairs, up the stairs, and onto the upstairs landing.  We pulled up the tack boards and spent HOURS pulling out staples.  What we learned was this carpet was not the first round of fur these hardwood floors had received.  And we had double the rusted, easily breakable staples to pull out.  This required not just hard work and dedication, but serious tools.  This is what Nick brought to day two of staple removal, and this demonstrates how hardcore we needed to become:



 You also are able to get a close up view of the amount of staples that could be found in just the bottom step alone.  You go Nick!!  Here we are eating lunch after our removal.  We are tired, hungry, and sitting on an absolute 180 from what we walked on when we first saw this place. 

After pulling out the staples that lined the perimeter and center of our entire living space downstairs, we moved on to the mother load...the STAIRS.  What I tried to demonstrate in this picture was the amount of staples that violated each outstanding oak plank.  80 rusted staples, at least, in each.  The staples were old, rusty, breakable, and took over just not the tops of the steps, but the front, sides, and under the lip of our almost perfect oakness.  It took four people a full day full of determination, a solo cup staple drop station, and random grunts & curse words to remove every single one.  Because of the breakable state of the staples, the aforementioned tools were necessary to pull out miniscule shreds of poking metal. 

 Every little blue dot is a staple holding down not only carpet shreds, but years of wear, tear, and bad decisions of  rose & avocado plushness. 

We decided to tackle the upstairs landing too... 

 The stair "Dream Team."  By the end of it all, we had a strategic placement plan

to maximize our efficiency.

 

At the end of it all, this was the landing we were left with:

And the new view from the stairs.  Ten million staples removed and clean wood!!

It was a loooong two days of hard work, blood, sweat, and tears.  We were thrilled to see our clean walls and naked floors.  With the weekend coming to a close, we made swift decisions as to what we should get our hands into next before I needed to return to Central PA for work and before Sean jumped into his new job.