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. 



Jumping in "Head First"

I like to think of this photo as "The Calm Before the Storm." 

 

Sean and I had our celebratory lunch after getting the keys, snapped some before photos, and treated ourselves to a beer on the rose carpet of OUR NEW HOME!  We considered this a celebration of sorts, and a little boost before we dove into the wallpaper in the kitchen.  These next photos are also a little ironic looking back now...

That is me smiling taking down the first sheet of paper.  Let me rephrase that: That is me smiling, taking down the first LAYER of the first sheet of wallpaper. 

That's one excitable and clueless face!!

Check out those steamer skills!!  What we did not realize was that we were dealing with very old, very layered paper on very originally plastered walls. 

 

While the two of us were working on the kitchen's first layer, we received help from Sean's family.  I need to take a second here to say a big THANK YOU for every second of your time, every blister you received, and every hunk of sticky glue you had to pick off of yourself.  They were a huge help and we will always be grateful for that time.  After we realized the paper situation we were actually facing, here's what happened:

 

 

Looking at the shreds still gives me shivers.  Every inch of every layer needed soaked, scraped, soaked again and scraped again.  And not just with those spackle contraptions that you see the guys on HGTV using.  Oh no.  Our scrapers had blades...blades that dulled faster than you would believe when facing goopy, latched-on-and-I'm-never-leaving adhesive and paper.  This was the first time in my life where I cursed an old woman.  (Sorry Pat, I take it back.  Thank you for selling to us)!

 

After a long night of scraping and picking with an unbelievable team, we had tackled the downstairs!! So hours after getting the keys in our hands, this is what the house looked like.  August 9th was a long day, but gosh darn it was it productive!  We gathered up the scraps, picked the stuck-on paper off of the bottom of our shoes, and flopped our tired, home owning selves on an air mattress in the middle of the living room.  After all it was our floor to finally sleep on...

 



The "Befores"

As soon as we got the keys on the 9th, we headed to Bogart's for a celebratory lunch, changed our clothes, and dug right into wallpaper!  Before the sticky & sweaty uncovering of the walls, I snapped a few "Before" pics so we would always remember how we bought the house and how far we have come.  Here is the house exactly how we bought it:

   

 Dining Room

Our dining room was equipped with plush rose-colored carpeting, blue & white floral wall paper, & a crystal chandelier.  The space is HUGE and has the character with the arched doorway and loads of light due to two nice sized windows.  You can see the kitchen peeking in the left hand corner.  We would love to chop that wall in half and create a breakfast bar (super way into the future plans!)

 

Living Room

 

The living room is another large room where the rose carpet continues.  When we looked at the home the previous owner had at LEAST 15 pieces of furniture scattered throughout.  So what a refreshing sight when we opened the door on this day and were able to see just how big the room really felt.  This room is also plastered in wallpaper, every centimeter (even inside the window frames!) and has a gas fire place which adds more charm & warmth- AND above it a perfect place for Sean to hang his ginormous TV.   

 

Here's a view of the living room from the stairs.  Another arched doorway :)

 

Kitchen

Here's a shot of our kitchen.  The interesting bits of this room are the glazed blue & pink bathroom tile, wallpaper, Lady Kenmore appliances, ceiling fan, and lack of functionality.  The room is actually a really good size with the cabinets being in great shape.  The kitchen is right next to the dining room and has a door outside to the back of the house and a door to the basement.  This kitchen is screaming some day potential, and has been an interesting little "catch all" while we work on the house.  I love the big window by the sink, and the back of the kitchen is a great amount of space. 

 

Office

The office is a really long room where the previous owner put an extra closet next to the original.  We were blessed with more yellowed wallpaper and the carpet could use a little TLC.  This room is also a great size with high ceilings.  Now that we have our little computer desk in this room, you can see just how much space we really have. 

 

Master Bedroom

Another good-sized room with lots of character with the slanted ceilings.  You can't see very clearly here, but there is also wallpaper in this room that matches the theme throughout the home as well as the carpeting. 

 

Guest Bedroom

The guest bedroom makes for the exception in the home in that....(wait for it...) NO WALLPAPER!!!  I love the little nooks & crannies in this room & I feel like this spot in particular is screaming window seat!!

 

Bathroom

Ahhh our bathroom.  Also no wallpaper (very lucky!!) but a continuation of the pink theme.  I love the originality of the tile on the floor, but we need to make a few adjustments in here some day.  As you can see the toilet is extremely close to the vanity, making certain things a little too cozy for my 6'4" boyfriend.  The vanity is also kinda sinking in and while I was one of those kids that enjoyed the taste of Pepto, seeing it on the walls in glazed tile form is a bit much. 

 

So that's our little slice of Delco heaven!!  My brain spins with ideas as each day passes, and keeping my OCD under check has been a challenge, but I'm doing just fine!  We feel extremely fortunate to have been able to purchase a home and every little inch by inch we are happy to make this place ours.  I plan on posting our progress, so stay tuned!!