What's Been Going On Around Here

It's high time we had an update around here! 

I hope you're all enjoying a nice spring. It's been a busy one for us so far. My husband and I spent the weekend helping our oldest daughter and her fiancé prime and paint the 
four bedrooms in their new house. 

We had a lot of fun but, boy, am I pooped today! 

On our home front, things are starting to get back to normal after having the new floors installed. The family room floors are finally done and happily curing. I've decided having floors installed and finished on site is kind of like giving birth; if we women didn't eventually forget the pain, we just might never voluntarily go through it all again. 

But, seriously, we do love our new floors!

There's not much going on outside around here yet. Local wisdom says not to plant your annuals until the snow has melted off of Shafer Butte. Since it keeps melting and snowing again up there, I'm playing it safe and waiting for next month.

 Spring has made a tentative showing indoors, though, with some flowers, a birdhouse, and a favorite ceramic bird.

The photo clipboards above the sofa are sporting some pretty spring art.

Free botanical prints from A Daily Something.

Tucker is back to looking at me like I'm nuts for walking all around the house pointing my camera at everything like I've never seen it all before a million times.  

When I say things are starting to get back to normal at our house, I really mean just starting. My chalkboard is still wearing its winter menu!

I did manage a bit of spring decorating in the dining room, too, though. And we also rearranged the furniture a bit when we moved it back in. We moved this homemade cupboard from the entryway into the dining room where there's room now beside the new table. I always wanted a buffet in the dining room! 

You can see my new green glass candlesticks from World Market peeking over the tray. I fell in love with their pretty sparkly spring green color and they're one of my favorite possessions now, but my taper candles are still packed away! 

 We are enjoying all the room beside our new table, and how we can easily fit six chairs here now. Walking between rooms feels so much better now.

Here's a close-up of the top of our new industrial/rustic/farmhouse table. 

 We ended up finding the perfect affordable sun blocking solution for our south facing window at Lowes with this lined bamboo blind. It even has a narrow black stripe that looks great with our black Windsor chairs.

I also like the way it picks up the other textures in the dining room and how it balances out the visual weight of the buffet and chalkboard on the opposite wall.

The best part is how I can close it part way to block the sun while still enjoying the sheer white cafe curtain below it as it softly billows into the room from the breeze through the open window. I just love curtains billowing in the spring breeze!

Did you notice the empty corner cabinet and the glimpse of our bare hutch in the next room?

Bare as can be! And the poor orchid all alone there on our old dining room table as it sits waiting for its new home at our daughter's house. If I didn't love the lack of clutter so much just now, I might be a little embarrassed to show you I haven't unpacked yet.

And the living room is just as empty! Well, not empty, just not decorated. I think I haven't unpacked yet because I'm simply enjoying all this calm after the chaos so much. I haven't even felt moved to add a colorful pillow to the sofa. Every once in awhile, I just walk in here and look at the beautiful new floors and feel utterly satisfied!

I'm not sure how long this will last. I ordered a couple of new area rugs, and maybe when I get them I'll be inspired to unpack and decorate again. 

By the way, how do you like the new furniture layout? It's so much more open, and we're really enjoying it for now. 


Before I go, I want to share some exciting news. My dear friend (really one of the nicest, sweetest bloggers in the whole world) Sharon, of Elizabeth & Co. has opened an Etsy shop where she's now offering the most gorgeous handmade wreaths you have ever seen. This is just a tiny sample of her exquisite creations.

ElizabethandCoWreath

Aren't they simply breathtaking? Way to go, Sharon! Best of luck with your newest creative endeavor.


I'm so glad you all stopped in to catch-up with me today.

Have a most wonderful week, everyone!

How about a fun spring party?!

Between Naps On The Porch
Mod Vintage Life
The Scoop
Cozy Little House
From My Front Porch To Yours
Our Home Away From Home
A Stroll Thru Life
Coastal Charm
Elizabeth & Co.

New Hardwood Floors - Reveal

This afternoon, with the installation of the base shoe molding and the last of the touch-up painting, our new hardwood floors were completed in the living room and dining room. Tomorrow, we'll move the furniture back in, but first I thought you might like to see the new floors without anything on them. I visited many websites and blogs searching for examples of different floors when deciding on ours, and I wanted to give as much information here as possible to help others doing so.

These are sanded and sealed on site hardwood floors, meaning the bare tongue and groove boards were nailed down to the sub floor then sanded and sealed on site, as opposed to manufactured hardwood floors which are installed already finished. Our wood is rift and quarter sawn white oak, which gives it the characteristic tiger grain pattern and makes it very strong and stable, minimizing cupping and shrinking. 

Our floors were stained with one coat of Minwax Special Walnut stain and finished with two coats of very durable satin Glitsa. We chose a medium neutral brown color that won't show dust and will darken over time. We'll need to have a maintenance coat of Glitsa applied every five to eight years, but the rustic grain pattern of our wood should minimize the appearance of scratches.  

The staining and sealing stage is toxic and extremely smelly, so we stayed at my daughter's house for four nights and kept our windows open for another four days after returning before the odor dissipated completely. 

I've tried to minimize editing of these photos so that what I'm seeing on my computer screen is what I see when I look at my floors. When choosing a stain I found that Special Walnut on white oak tended to have a slightly yellow cast rather than an orange (Early American) or red (Chestnut) one.

 I love how the late afternoon sunlight warms the wood and makes it glow. Going through the whole process of having our floors finished on site really makes us appreciate that this beautiful wood was once a living oak tree. It's a long messy process to live through, but we feel a connection to our floors and absolutely love every single knot and grain pattern. Sounds sappy (pun intended), but we'd do it all over again.

And in fact we are, because this weekend we start the whole process over again on our family room floors.

We bought this baby gate to keep Tucker off the floors until they're fully cured and we can put our area rugs back down, especially at the front door where he does his happy dance when someone knocks at the door. At the bottom of this photo in front of the gate and behind my watermark you can see how well the kitchen tile color and new wood floor color blends. Even though the surfaces are different, the similar colors help make the floor appear fairly seamless.

We couldn't be happier with how our floors turned out. We did a lot of homework before deciding on site finished floors, the wood, color, and finish, and then we waited for the best contractor. We feel like all the careful preparation really paid off with the beautiful floors we always wanted. 

Thanks for taking the journey with us!

Read more about our hardwood floor saga:

New Hardwood Floors - Preparation

New Hardwood Floors - Demolition

New Hardwood Floors - Installation

It's party time!

My Repurposed Life
  Between Naps On The Porch
Our Home Away From Home
The Scoop
Savvy Southern Style
Share Your Style

New Hardwood Floors - Installation

Thank you for all your get well wishes regarding my short illness. I'm happy to say I'm feeling much better. 

Another flooring update here today. Oh goody!

 Our new floors have been installed and are being sanded as I type this. Yesterday, Tucker and I went over to my daughter's house because the nailing was pretty noisy, but today's sanding noise is tolerable if I keep my studio door closed.

One of the reasons we love our contractor is because he's so good at figuring out the idiosyncrasies of old North End craftsmen style cottages. Here's an example: our foundation, except the perimeter, is made of posts sitting on big flat rocks sitting on the dirt. Not nice square blocks cut or chiseled from rocks, just big rocks. If this system hadn't been working at holding up our house for the past 105 years, it would be a little scary. When you see it, you say holy cow, how is that rock foundation that looks kind of wobbly, holding up this big heavy house? 

But it does. 

We've always had a big hump going across our living room floor. It's a significant hump so that all the furniture I arrange on one side of the hump leans one way, and all the furniture I arrange on the other side of the hump leans the other way. It bugged me a lot at first (just try hanging a level picture over a leaning sofa sometime), but you learn to live with these things in an old house. We always attributed the hump to our weird foundation shifting around, and since it hasn't changed in the 25 years we've lived here, we stopped thinking about it.

We just figured the new floors would have a hump, too, which didn't thrill us, but our contractor isn't big on new floors with humps in them at all. So he investigated around under the floor in the crawl space and found out that for some reason a long time ago, someone put some shims between the posts on the wobbly rocks and the beams supporting the middle of our living room floor. Who knows why, maybe the floor used to sag a bit. Only they must have eyeballed it or something instead of measuring properly, and they shimmed it too much, creating a 3/4-inch hump in the floor.  3/4" is a very big deal when you're talking about level floors! We find weird stuff like this all the time in our house. It really makes us wonder about the people who used to live here. Didn't they notice they put in too many shims? Didn't they notice the hump in the floor?

Weird.

Anyway, our contractor takes these weird things he finds in The North End homes he remodels in-stride. He just pulled out one of the shims on each side, and now our new floor is even. We would have worried the house would fall down if we tried to do that. 

He's not worried.      

 I love our new heat vents. 

 The smelly staining and sealing of our floors come next, so we'll be away from the house for a day or two. (Any robbers reading this, don't rob us because you'll die of toxic fumes which would serve you right.)

Actually, in case the security alarm doesn't give you pause, we're leaving a pit bull in the yard and the neighbors have shotguns. 

When we come back, I'll be able to show you our finished floors. 

Yay!

Read more about our Hardwood Floor Saga

Hardwood Floors - Preparation

Hardwood Floors - Demolition

New Hardwood Floors - Demolition

I was sick as a dog yesterday. In fact, I was so sick that I actually slept through all the scraping and nail-pulling happening on the other side of our house as our old maple floors were torn out in preparation for installing the new oak ones. 

This morning I felt better, enough to crawl out of bed and snap some photos of the post demolition for you.

It's always a shock to see your house torn up, but I'm getting to be kind of an expert at it. My first thought was that I was happy to see the guys had taped off everything well.

  These are the original 105 year-old Douglas fir floors that were beneath the maple ones. (See those in my previous post here.)

 After a lot of discussion with the flooring experts we decided this soft fir just wouldn't hold up to everyday wear in our high traffic areas, and we decided on white oak instead.

 Now that we see them gouged, cracked, paint spattered, stained, mismatched from terrible past repairs (such as this one where a bedroom wall was removed to make the living room larger) and just generally abused, we're feeling okay about our decision to cover up the poor things again.

 This was where a closet wall was. 

  

 Here, you can see the mix of wide and narrow boards which was a common practice to save money in the old days. The wider, cheaper wood went under the rugs where no one would see it. 

It looks like the boards beneath the rugs weren't stained or waxed, either. It's interesting to see how the people who went before us lived here. (Sorry, but they were kinda sloppy.)

 Now that we know the mysteries beneath the humps and bumps in our floor, our contractor thinks he can even them out a bit before laying the new one. We'll also be moving our heat vents and cold air returns to the outside walls for more efficient heat in our always chilly living room. And a really nice bonus to getting new floors is they'll be screwing down the subfloor tighter so the squeaks will go away. 

  Here's our old floor piled on the front porch. Bye-bye! (I'm happy to say this maple was given to a man on Craigslist who will re-mill it for new flooring.) 

Next week comes the installation of the new floor. I'm so excited but nervous about picking the right stain color. Any input on colors from my wise readers would be appreciated very much.

Now, I'm going to crawl back into bed and snooze some more.

I hope you have a great weekend!

Read more about our new floor saga:

New Hardwood Floors - Preparation

New Hardwood Floors - Preparation

I'm sending a big high-five out to everyone because we all made it to March! For me this has been a hard winter because it was unusually cloudy here. I'm one of those people who needs the sunlight to keep my brain from turning to mush, so I've had a bad case of brain fog the past few weeks. I know the arrival of March and more sunshine means I'll be feeling more like my old self soon. 

I know many of you are sick of winter too, so 

HIGH-FIVE!

We made it to March and spring is just around the corner!

Our new floor project is progressing right along. The first weekend we packed up all our small stuff, and my husband lugged the boxes upstairs to store in the loft.

 Last weekend he moved the furniture and rugs out.

 You know how your hair always looks great the day before your haircut, and you start to rethink your appointment with your stylist? 

 We're going through that with our old maple floors. They're looking pretty good to us all of a sudden, and we experienced a little floor replacer's remorse over the weekend. I think that's only natural, since we've lived with these pretty floors for almost twenty-five years and have many good memories of fun family times on them. The reality is they're worn to the nub and can't be refinished again, and it's time to move-on.

Probably because the sun is shining into these rooms again after a long dark winter, I'm loving our wide open empty living room without the furniture. I'm feeling inspired to rearrange the furniture when we put it back in. 

Ah-Ha! I feel a twinge of excitement and motivation breaking through my fog!

You can see here in the dining room how the floor darkened around the rug over time, but not under it. I'm not sure how or if this can be avoided with the new floors. Any ideas?

 The wood for the new floor is coming on Tuesday to acclimate for a week before installation. Meanwhile, we're living back here in the family room. Do you like the new Manchester Tan walls my husband painted over the weekend? And can you believe we fit all this furniture in here? Our leather sectional is so huge, we sometimes forget how large this room really is, but we were still able to fit the living room sofa and big reading chair and second ottoman in here. Tucker's memory foam bed (usually over in the corner) takes up a pretty big chunk of real estate, too. That's his favorite blue toy with him, and his blankie. I can't believe my big old tough black lab has a blankie, but he does! He loves it!

 Here's where the rest of our furniture is, in the master bedroom, which is off the dining room. It was way easier to move it all in here instead of to the back of the house or upstairs to the loft. The coffee tables are stacked in the closet, and we have even pressed the master bathroom into service. We can close and tape off this bedroom door and tape off the opening to the kitchen so the dust will be contained to the rooms getting new floors. Meanwhile, we're sleeping in the guest room. It's working out great so far, so it wasn't necessary for me to be such a cry baby about it. I'm feeling rather sheepish about that because the anticipation was far worse than the reality. 

Thanks for coming by to check out the floor update. Demo on the old floors starts later this week, so I hope you come on back to see the mess (and fun).

I'm sharing the floor fun over at

Between Naps On The Porch
Mod Vintage Life
Our Home Away From Home
Cozy Little House
The Scoop
A Stroll Thru Life
Elizabeth & Co.
Savvy Southern Style