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!

laundry room day 2

getting ready for the tile!
we decided to use tile in the laundry room. we came across a great deal at the habitat restore and found several cases of tile. or we may use some tile leftover from other homes we have rehabbed. which ever we decide to use, we know we need a sturdy sub floor! nick spent a long time painstakingly leveling a previously very un-level floor. he then put down a layer of heavy duty sub floor. the floor already has never felt so sturdy. go nick! now, for the tile backer board.

(sorry for the not so stellar picture, i took it this morning after we had dragged the refrigerator into the room friday night and then back out again today).
you may remember that when we replaced the roof on the house we also raised the roof in this room to be as tall as the rest of the house. with the room empty, we  decided now would also be a good idea to go ahead and rip out that low ceiling. here are some pictures of the roof lines, before and after:

before

after

and this is the laundry room as it was, in all its glory!

laundry room

well wouldn't ya just know it? our washing machine has bit the dust!  

renovation conundrum: 

do we A) freak out and get really mad that everything keeps going wrong (um, okay, maybe just for a second) or do we B) keep that glass half full and find the positive in this situation?

 that's right boys and girls, we went with option B. (important side note- choosing option B is really really important. this is how to maintain sanity during an epic home renovation!)

remember that girder we just replaced underneath the house? it was directly underneath the laundry room. and let me tell you, that floor was a mess! rotten-VILLE! mushy everywhere. so, with the washing machine out, we are taking out the dryer and everything else and building us a new floor.

ripping up the floor

now we all know that there wouldn't be just one layer of flooring underneath that laminate (that IS why this blog is called 18 layers of wallpaper!).  nope there was five, at least. not counting the floor we have seen everyday since we've been here or the sub floor, there were three layers of heavy duty flooring and at least two layers of laminate! 

layers upon layers

it appears that this room was once a porch. the bottom layer was slanted like the old porches used to be to keep water away from the house and facilitate cleaning. when the porch was enclosed, they built up the floor to make it level and then added more layers of flooring as necessary, maybe for aesthetics? maybe to cover rotten spots? who knows...

nick ripped up all of the flooring and supported the utility closets in the room and added and leveled some new floor joists. it was a long day!

 i left to go make pots and came home to this:

our new floor!

just kidding! this is not the new floor, but we had to have a way to cover the floors for the night. we considered just putting a board across across the floor to create a bridge from our newly created den, to our kitchen. but with an adventurous cat, an arthritic senior dog, a spastic schnauzer dog, one really good dog and a fairly clumsy wife, nick decided it would be best to cover the whole floor for the night. tomorrow, getting ready for tile!

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

yesterday's finds

yesterday we were working on starting to fix the old termite damage on the hardwoods.
nick spent six long hours slowly pulling out each of these boards individually. we used a video by ron hazelton (see yesterday's blog post) as a reference. initially nick used a circular saw to cut  the perimeter of the board and then chiseled the ends to be able to lift out the board without disturbing the tongue and groove. BUT the boards were nailed down and we quickly discovered these nails could be hazardous when they were hit with the saw blade. sparks and nail shards flying everywhere! nick had to come up with a new plan. he used a chisel and hammered several spots on each board to save the tongue and groove.  several blisters, many bruises and maybe a fractured bone later, we feel like we made some serious progress!

here are some pictures of how it went:

large square in the living room

several runs from the living room into the dining room

 we found some damage to the sub floor in the living room:

a close up of some sub floor damage

also we found sub floor damage in the dining room by the fireplace: 

close up

upon further inspection, we found more damaged beams under neath the floor. 

luckily, they all seem to be relatively easy fixes.  

we also got to add a new support beam under the floor yesterday.