its a bedroom!

nick finished the wall!

take a look...

new paint!

new floor!

new wall!

leveling the floor

these crazy old floor need a bit of straightening before we put down the new floors.

we were surprised at finding relatively little rot was below the hardwoods.  but we are laying new plywood to give the floors extra support and to level the floors.

laying shims

geometry

just a little rot

making progress

almost there

done

and now its time to paint!

deciding on the floor...

if you have been reading previous blog entries, you will know that recently we decided to turn the dining room into our bedroom and make the old "library" into the dining room.

if you keep up with the blog, you will also know that we have been trying to decide what to do about the beautiful, but in spots, ruined heart pine floors that are in the front two rooms. the two rooms are open to each other and have long spans of wood running across. nick, board by board, painstakingly removed most of the boards ruined by termite damage. we have been trying to order replacement flooring to place the wood. its an odd size of 2.5 inches. no one carries it! and we don't want have to rip down a three inch board. we found a place where we can order salvaged heart pine. yay, right?

no, its kind of more of a BOOOO. its $8 dollars a foot and will get here in 6 to 8 weeks. after calculating the square footage we need, which as of right now, and if all things go well,  is about 100 square feet. mathematician says $800 dollars?!?! boy, that's a lot of money... 

BUT THE BUDGET!

what to do....what to do...?

wait! the floors don't have to be continuous between these two rooms anymore. we are putting up a wall. solution: take out the old floor in the new bedroom and use it to repair the living room floor!

taking out the floor in the bedroom

of course we found some rot in the subfloor. not a shocker. we will fix that!

we call that an opportunity. 

subfloor

all done!

to be as least wasteful as possible, we think we will end up using left over floor that we have from another house. but, we'll let you know!

re/staining the floor

DO OVER!!!!

so we decided to re sand the floors.

this looks much better!

loving it!

i like this picture because this is how far i got before i ran out of stain.
7:30 pm trips to lowes ROCK! NOT!

all done!

the final product

love it!!!

the library/dining room

the room once known as the library will become the dining room.

but, until we get the house more situated, the "dining room" is going to become our den. last week i primed our new drywall. now we are ready to paint! 

as you know, the pine floors (mostly heart pine!) in the house need to be redone. we decided to go ahead and redo the floors in the future dining room:

dining room: we rented a sander from lowes

this lowes sander is a pain in the rear end. the sandpaper only lasts like 5 seconds. 

ugh, the price we pay for gorgeous floors!

sanding the floor

now that the floor is all sanded, its time to stain. 

we chose rustoleum kona.

(yo dude. don't judge me on my method!)

first coat

hmmmm....looks a little funky! but i keep going anyway. 

(will this be a problem later? you betcha!)

next picture is so you can see the progression:

before sanding right half of picture
after sanding bottom left
first "attempt" at staining left middle

it is a little uneven

but not too bad right?

uh, yeah....we're going to have to redo that. apparently we didn't take off all of the previous polyurethane. hehe. OOPS!

flooring verdict

we have decided to tear up the old flooring in the dining room and the living room, fearing that over time, more termite gaps might open up.  replacing it with left over flooring from another house we built, we will salvage all the flooring that we can and reuse it somewhere else. we didn't want to cover up the damage to the sub floor. the rotten sub floor will also be repaired and replaced where necessary.  fortunately we will be able to reuse the salvaged wood from the demolished roof to replace the sub floor! we will continue to keep the dining room and living room "under construction". 

the electrician should be done today. soon, we will have our final inspection for the permits we had to obtain from the city of asheville to renovate the front half of the house. keep the positive thoughts coming our way! also, we have since cleared out the back room we were using for storage and made ourselves a den. the single room that was once our "studio apartment" is now our bedroom. we are so excited to have a three room house!!!

thanks for following our adventure and we will continue to keep you updated!

wishing everyone well.

nick and trista

addressing the hardwood floors

the drywall is sanded. yay!

we are now thinking about addressing the floors in the main living spaces. sadly, as the construction has taken place, more and more of these old termite channels have surfaced. so much of this floor is damaged!!! holy shnikees! ugh. we have done some research and found this video to be very helpful!

ron hazelton video

our budget for the front of the house is well, slim to none at this point. redoing the whole floor is not an option we want to consider at this point. 

so we are trying to come up with a creative solution...

we'll let you know what we decide!