Wood Flooring... Again

Last Saturday Dan officially moved in and it is so much fun having a roomie! He is such a sweetheart and always willing to help with house chores so I think we all made the right choice having him move in! He has been sleeping on an air mattress since last week and Thursday night he finally had his bed delivered, which he found at Sam's club. The bed he chose is called "Night Therapy," and it came tightly rolled up in a box.

So strange

You cut it open and it unfolds completely

The bed is surprisingly comfortable and super reasonably priced so we are considering buying the same bed for our guest room! 

Brother bonding moment

After putting the bed together, we decided to do a light night tile ripping session of the third floor tiles.We have been living with boxes of wood in our office for the past couple of weeks and we are ready for the wood floors to be done. 

Before

During

It's amazing how much faster things go with an extra person! We were able to have all the tiles ripped out and in our favorite dumpster down the street in less than an hour!

We went to New York on Friday night so Saturday was a very light day of house work.  After having a very lazy day, Andrew prepped the floors for Sunday's flooring while I painted every other step black!

Ghettooooo

This was my first experience using an oil-based paint. It was definitely much different from working with normal paint and so difficult to clean but I was very happy with the end results! 

The paint needs to dry for at least 12 hours before painting another coat and we can't walk on it for about a week so the poor cats had to spend the night in the basement :( In hindsight, it was not the best idea to paint the stairs the day before we did hardwood upstairs since we had to run up and down the stairs all day, but lesson learned for next time. Is there ever a right time to paint stairs?

After

Sunday morning we were up bright and early to finally install our second to last wood floors (we are carpeting the bedrooms and putting wood floors in the office)! The first, and trickiest part, is starting the floor at the stairs to ensure the floors are square. Andrew measured the stair and realized that we needed to cut it to make it fit over the old step.

My little table saw-er

Andrew was a quarter of the way cutting through the stair when the table saw suddenly turned off. At this point, we had already picked up the nail gun rental at Home Depot and we were fully invested in starting the floors. All three of us played with the table saw for awhile to try to make it work.

Why won't it work!?

After about an hour of trying to make it work, Dan finally said, "Hey, did you guys try the reset button?"... and we were back in business! Welcome to projects with Andrew and Emma, Dan :)

Finally getting started

And of course the cats helped

When Andrew and I installed the second floor we were up and ready to go at 8:30am but it wasn't until 12pm that we finally nailed our first board. We ran into so many unexpected issues and by 8:00pm we weren't finished. This time, we used 12pm as our benchmark and, after the saw mishap, we met it! We started the floors just before 12:00pm. I was the board selector, Andrew was the nailer and Dan helped wherever we needed him until he got the hang of it.

Dan working hard

It is amazing what a difference an extra hand makes! While Andrew was busy cutting the boards for the trickiest areas (doorways, closets, ends of the hallway), Dan and I were able to make some serious progress. Dan was even impressed at my crowbar abilities! We all quickly realized how not square our walls are so we did have to get a little creative with the wall edges to improve the gap. We hope that it won't be noticeable when we put up the trim!

By 6:00 I was able to take the nail gun back to Home Depot! That doesn't sound very impressive but it is HUGE for us! I got home at 7:00pm to one of the best sounds, a vacuum! The boys were cleaning up the mess because we actually finished the floors!

Yay! No more nasty tile!

The only remaining wood! Not bad!

Only a few more weekends left before our triathlon party but we are making progress! I need to finish up the stairs (sorry family) and put up the trim for the floors to be in a good place. I never could have imagined that it would take this long - our original plan was to do downstairs and both hallways the first weekend after we moved in... so funny! Next weekend we are going to start looking at carpets so we can finish up the bedrooms! Stay tuned :)