Update on The House!!
We are now a few weeks away from the beginning of the school year and we still have a good amount of work to do before The House is ready, but we are getting so close!!
I got the walls all painted in July. Letty from work came one day and helped out which was fun! We were able to knock out the entire downstairs in one day. Dad helped with my bedroom (the high ceilings were not reachable for me on the ladder...), but, again, done in a day! Check out my light gray with teal accent wall. Oh, and I painted ALL THE TRIM. Which is horribly boring and tedious (but better than ripping out tile, I've now discovered). I'm pretty proud of all the lovely white trim. :)
This shot also includes the beautiful new carpet. The old carpet was really gross. The previous owner had two elderly, incontinent dogs that peed everywhere. So much so, that it soaked through the old carpet AND padding to stain the subfloor (don't worry, we painted over the pee spots with special mildew stuff paint). We (re: Dad with help and sushi from me) are putting down laminate in the rest of the house.
A problem arose painting the stairway. The original idea was to have dad on the dual level ladder doing the cutting in and then I would come in with the extender and paint the rest of it. As you can see in the next picture, that didn't quite work out. About halfway through we decided he was going to fall off and die. So I'm going to be hiring some painters to come. Waiting on one more quote and then I can get that scheduled. Yay!
A few weeks ago Dad and I finished putting in the laminate upstairs (ignore the lack of baseboards). My dad is so cool.
Then my dad went on vacation leaving me instructions on how to work on taking out the tile from downstairs. He gave me a GIANT THOR HAMMER, a big iron stick, a scraper, a smaller THOR HAMMER, and instructions to bash it all to heck. You see this picture? This is two days of me working until I was no longer worthy to lift THOR'S HAMMER (ie: I am weak and my arms turned into very painful noodles).
The last 10 minutes or so of this was me sitting on the floor despondently lifting and dropping the hammer trying not to cry.
It was really hard.
So I hit Google looking for power tools that help rip out tile. Some of the searches might have been a little sarcastic and mean spirited, but it ended up with me renting a legit jackhammer on Monday and busting that tile TO DUST. HELL. YES.
Dad did most of the work, but I helped! Again, I am weak and could only lift and maneuver the jackhammer for so long before I had to pass it back to the padre. But it went SO MUCH FASTER. The same size area that took me two days with THOR'S HAMMER took about 5 minutes with the jackhammer.
We were able to finish the rest of the tile in about two hours of hard work. My entire downstairs is completely covered in dust which is fun, but totally worth it. Now I just need to rip out the layer that was between the tile and the subfloor (I don't even know what to call it) which is fun because it is nailed down AND cemented in some spots. Most of it is pretty easy, though. Then we can install the flooring downstairs (once Dad gets back from his cruise, of course).
What's left to do (in no particular order):
- Rip out floor thing downstairs
- Dump ripped out tile and floor stuff
- Install downstairs laminate
- Take nails out of base boards and paint
- Reinstall baseboards
- Put outlet face plates back on
- Caulk doors and do touch up painting on trim/walls
- CLEAN. SO MUCH CLEANING.
Some things can be done after moving in, but I'll still probably be moving into The House during the first few weeks of school. So excited to do a before and after post! Stay tuned!!
