Removing Plywood

This is what our kitchen floor has looked like for the past year or so. I started off removing the vinyl flooring, but it was extremely time consuming, and the other half of the kitchen has an additional layer of older vinyl or linoleum, with what appears to be an asbestos adhesive. Not something I wanted to mess with.

We made an executive decision last weekend to take up the old plywood. It would end up costing us some more money, because we'd be buying brand new plywood, but the amount of time it would save alone makes it completely worth it. Plus we got a thinner plywood, so the top of the new finished floor will be level with the hearth and Dining Room floor.

We made it our goal to get at least half of the kitchen done today. It was mostly R tearing up the plywood (which was nailed every 2"!), but I would start each piece off, removing any screws and taking up the first couple nails. By the end of the day, we reached our goal and got all of the plywood out on the fireplace side of the kitchen. And we went and bought all the new plywood. We didn't find too many strange things, except that the floor we've been walking on in our hall is actually the kitchen's sub-floor, the plywood went underneath the "wall" separating the kitchen and hall (it's basically just a piece of drywall screwed into some wood paneling... no structural support at all.. about 1 1/2" thick), and that the floor wasn't in as bad shape as we originally thought. It's still not good enough for us to use as a finished floor, but it's not as unsafe as we thought. We've been walking on it for almost a week now and it's supporting us just fine!

The threshold between the kitchen and hall.. we've decided to run the new floor into the hall, to get rid of the awkward, thin threshold. The new thresholds will be between the hall and bathroom and hall and living room, and will be normal width and less of a tripping hazard.

The only area (so far, fingers crossed) that was in bad condition, though not bad enough that it needed to be replaced, was in front of the window, where the 700 lb. radiator sat for 60 years. There's a little water damage and some broken wood.

(If you look carefully, you can also see that I did a little paint test on one wall.. we both hated the color at first, but a couple days later it had grown on us and we like it now :) )

We're Back in the 21st Century!

Since the end of July, we've had no power in the back half of our house. It's felt like a lot longer than that. For about a month we didn't use our downstairs bathroom, until R decided to run an extension cord to a lamp that's sitting on a pile of boxes. We had to use flashlights to get up the backstairs at night. There's a long exterior-use extension cord running from the Guest Bedroom through my Office and into the Twilight Room to power either R's computer or the air conditioner. Vacuuming was not easy. You had to duck walking down the stairs (well, duck even more than you had to before) so you wouldn't hit your head on the wires coming out of the ceiling (don't worry.. it's not like they were live or anything). Summer '11 was a crazy one for us and if we were home for an entire weekend, R's time was taken up by things that were a little bit more pressing, such as cutting the grass (pretty much an all day job) or building the coop or preparing and then cleaning up after the hurricane.

But... we have a goal now. R's birthday is smack dab in the middle of October and we always have a family party (his family lives in a different state and we try to do as many things as we can down here so both families can be together because as uncharacteristic as this is, they actually like each other). My mom brought up a good point when I mentioned the party to her. "You can't have everyone (mostly extended family, aunts, uncles, cousins) over here with it looking exactly the same way it did in January for your birthday party!" *sigh* Once again, mom's right. While it's not like we've sat around doing nothing for the past 8 months, the things we've done wouldn't really be noticeable to "normal" people. "Oh, you added another coat of paint in here? Looks the same to me!" "You updated this outlet? Woww....." "Is that a new chimney cap I see? Impressive!" "A garden? A chicken coop? Is that all you've done this year?" (Sense the sarcasm?) The main thing people will notice is that the Kitchen basically looks exactly the same. Yeah, I've unpacked more boxes, organized the cabinets, painted the fireplace, did patching/etc on the walls. But the overall picture is exactly the same. I can't have that!! So the point of this story is... by the end of October, that Kitchen needs to be done. Done as in floor: installed. Walls: painted. Trim: installed and painted. Fireplace: painted and decorated. New light fixtures: installed. With that huge room done it'll make a huge difference! Plus it'll be a nice room to sit in and eat/talk with our relatives, as opposed to a half finished, dirty room.

The old light switch at the bottom of the stairs. It was only 34 cents! Look at that scary wiring!

The first step was to get all of the drywall up, taped and sanded. However, a couple months ago R took down some of the drywall under the window (while I was crying "now we're going backwards! :'( ). He had good reason. When I was in the Kitchen cooking, every once in awhile I'd hear crackling sounds. We traced the sounds back to the outlets under the windows. This scared the pyrophobiac (is this a word?) in me. R immediately turned off that breaker and a month later took down the drywall and tried to fix it. Long story short, he wasn't able to easily fix it. And then the Crazy Summer happened and it got put off until this weekend. I asked him to put up the drywall around the posts near the windows and he said that he would do that when he put the drywall back under the windows. So he fixed the outlets first. He had thoroughly researched it and knew exactly what to do this time. Piece of cake. Finished in about 2 hours. Then he was on an electrical roll. He moved on to the hall light (the point of this post. Finally). This wasn't as easy...
I'll admit, I wasn't there while he was fixing it, so I'm not 100% sure of exactly what he did or in what order. (Pyrophobia, remember?) All I know is that apparently what is in our walls is a mess. He cleaned it up where he could, adding new wire where he could. I flipped breakers when he told me to. He had blown-in insulation fall all over him when the plaster ceiling broke a little while he was drilling through it. He installed two (well, three really because he replaced the one in our bedroom while he was up there) new light switches and two new temporary light fixtures. This hall/staircase isn't at the top of our to-do list, it's maybe 4th after the Kitchen. But it will be re-done in the near future. And when that time comes, new nicer light fixtures will be installed. For now, it's just nice to finally have light fixtures in the steep, scary staircase we the most. And it's a little easier to sleep at night knowing that the wiring is a little safer. Someday... in the far future... we'll replace all of the wiring. But that's a huge job that we couldn't do ourselves, which means it'll have to wait :)

Kitchen Cabinet Hardware Installed

Today's biggest goal was to install the Kitchen cabinet hardware. While on a job site last week, I was talking to one of the cabinet installers and he gave me a tip on installing cabinet hardware. He always puts a piece of painter's tape on the cabinet, then measures center/hole lines on that, and drills right through the tape. That way you're not marking up the cabinet, and it's easy to change your mind (for example, for the larger drawers, I first measured for the pulls to be located dead center on the drawer, then we decided they looked better toward the top, so it was easy to change, and we didn't have to worry about cleaning up the old markings). We installed all of the pulls on the top drawers exactly centered, both vertically and horizontally. For the two larger drawers, we located the pulls centered horizontally, and the same distance from the top as the upper drawers. We not only liked the look better, but it'll be more functional.

And here are the same drawers with the new pulls. We also added two pulls to the fake panel in front of the sink. While installing them, R discovered that the panel pops off... which made me excited because that'll make it really easy to turn that useless panel into a handy flip-down drawer for sponges, etc.

I also decided to work on our bedroom door. The whole back hallway will be redone this year... new drywall, ceilings, etc., which will get done at the same time as the stairs and pantry. But I figured that for the time being I could get started on some of the dirty work... such as scraping the paint off of the doors. For Christmas I got a fancy paint scraper... It is good for scraping paint off of anything.. including paint rollers (the curved part of the scraper).

It did a great job! I had tried putty knives, spray paint removers, and a couple other types of scrapers with little lucky. Within an hour I had the door going from to this 

It may not seem like much, but it made a huge difference! I also scraped a bunch of paint off of this door's casing. I figure if I can get the doors in this hall (there are 2 of them) scraped now, then by the time it's warm out (will that ever happen? It's -2 degrees out right now..) I'll be able to take them outside to sand and paint.