The Floors

When I renovated a small early 1900's cottage in Australia, I found some beautiful hardwood floorboards hidden under shag carpet and black tiles. Chipping the tiles up was a chore, but once I'd finished, there was the floor, ready to be sanded and polished.

Nothing in this house has been that straightforward. Originally the entire first floor was done in nice maple floorboards. When James and I began this project, the kitchen was half aging linoleum and half tiles. The mudroom and bathroom were done in the same tiles. The hallway, and master bedroom that we converted back to a living room, were covered in wall to wall carpet. 

When all of these floor coverings were removed we found (in addition to the black mold in the mudroom/laundry area and bathroom): a complete patchwork of flooring. The maple floors were mostly intact in the living room, hallway and kitchen, albeit covered in glue. We scraped this off with a scraper and rented a floor sander to do the living room. It took us a full three days of tag team style working to sand the floor, due to how undulating the surface was, and how much glue remained. I've heard said floor sanding should be left to the professionals; you can end up with sanding drum marks if you don't have the right touch/timing. We have some light scuffing here and there, but it looks much improved from the tired old carpet. This isn't a museum quality renovation: we're not killing ourselves here. Working with what we've got, I coined the look I'm shooting for in this renovation: Rustic Farmhouse Chic.

As I mentioned in the first post, I don't believe this house ever was built to perfection. 

When we did all the glue-scraping and sanding in the living room, we came across an unpleasant surprise. At some point someone decided to stick a square of plywood in the middle of the room (maybe this was an opening to the basement?). At that, the perfectionist in me had to admit defeat. Did we want to try to track down some matching maple boards and re-floor half the room? No. We were renovating to a deadline and budget: our living room doubles as our guest room and summer, a.k.a. guest/tourist season, was upon us. I decided this eyesore would probably be under a throw rug, anyway. I took a straight edge, drew some pencil lines matching the adjoining floorboards, and the entire floor was finished in a couple coats of Varathane. It still pains me, but at least your eye doesn't shoot to that spot anymore. It is under a rug now.

WTF

In the kitchen there was more glue under the lino. I've slowly been scraping if off when I have a spare moment. Sometimes I prefer to work that way, rather than spend an entire afternoon in tedium. Plus, my wrist gets sore, so my scraping is less effective anyway. So short bursts, here and there is my preferred approach, when James is working on some heavy duty one man job and I feel like I'm just standing around. Eventually it'll be ready by the time we need sand and paint. (This is how I got the tiles up, too, for the most part: a few concentrated bursts.) I've discovered white vinegar poured and left to soak into the glue allows it to be wiped off instead of scraped. It's messy, but effective.

Speaking of tiles, once those were gone, it became apparent so too were the original maple floorboards: they'd been cut away and replaced with plywood. I managed to track down some maple flooring on Craigslist the same depth as our boards, but not the same length or width. We decided to paint the floors to tie them in better. Considering the kitchen/hallway/mudroom used to be part tiles, part lino, and part carpet, even with mismatched boards, our new look would be more uniform, and painted floors are in keeping with the old farmhouse aesthetic. 

We're re-flooring the bathroom, too, but our bathroom reno has gotten so involved I'm going to leave the entire topic for another post.

Literally chipping away

Tiles are off here. Plywood and various bits and pieces are being removed to make way for new flooring.

A new sub-floor: most of the old boards needed replacing.

The new (secondhand) floor going in over tar paper. The original floors are on the far right.
(Edit: I should add, before we laid this floor, we brought the wood inside to acclimate to the
temperature and humidity of the space we were installing it in (a week or more is recommended).
Because these were secondhand floors, we had to file out the grit that had accumulated in the
tongues and grooves. It had already been de-nailed.)

Pippi helped a lot. She made off with the chalk line chalk and proposed a game with Thomas, our older,
somewhat more sedate dog. His bed was covered in chalk, but her paws bore the tell-tale mark of a chalk thief.

I don't know who's reading this (bar a handful of our friends/family), so I am erring on the side of not boring you senseless with minutiae. But, when I'm mid-task/quandary and poring over the Internet, that is sometimes exactly what I want: the finer details, the tools used, etc. So please, ask away if you ever want me to go into more detail. 

The Un-Fun Stuff

A lot needed to happen before we could get onto the arguably more rewarding task of setting up the house to our taste.

A few decades ago James' grandmother had an addition built on the house, allegedly in kind of a hurry. I can't blame her--J's grandparents were raising six kids in a smallish 1.5 story farmhouse. The addition became the new living room. It's on cinder blocks while the rest of the house is on granite foundation. The exterior cladding is press board, which is not holding up well and clashes with the original wooden clapboards on the rest of the house. (We'll sort this out later.) The wood stove is in there, which is a pretty inefficient way to heat the house. It's on the farthest wall away from the rest of the living areas (bedrooms, kitchen, dining, etc.). The roof leaked during heavy rains and in winter when deep snow caused ice dams.

We had to shovel the roof off with every big snowstorm. 

Yes, I am quite determined to get dogs into every single blog post.
And yes, Pippi climbed that ladder herself.

So the first order of business was re-roofing the addition. We had to wait for the weather, of course. Fortunately James had roofing experience and we were able to do this job ourselves. (Mostly James, some me--just enough to note how much roofing kills your knees, and some Pippi.)

Good supervision is the key to success.

We got an energy audit done. The auditor foam-sealed gaps and lessened the overall draft for us. Based on his advice, we zeroed in on the areas that needed insulating, and got insulation blown into the attic and above the addition ceiling.

Before the insulation guys came, we removed the attic floorboards to make way for insulation.
This allowed us to rebuild the floor higher, so we can still have storage space up there, and not
just a room full of insulation.

We decided the house would be easier to heat, and cozier, if we reverted back to the original floor plan: all the living areas under the original roof. We converted the addition into James' wood shop. That actually was kind of fun. It's handy having a workshop just off your living area, especially in this climate; working outdoors or in an outbuilding is barely an option (unless that outbuilding is tricked out with all the mod cons)....And it gave us a room to tinker in while the rest of the house takes shape.

We also built a laundry area into the addition/James' workshop. The washer and dryer used to live in the mudroom/main entry and that kind of drove me nuts. So we moved them just to the other side of the wall. It seemed straightforward enough...it wasn't quite. There was black mold under the tiles, both on the wall, and floor. This became a serious affair with masks, white vinegar, bleach, etc. The sub-floor was rotten in many places and needed replacing. The wall had been pushed aside to make way for tiles: the studs were sawn off at the bottom where they should have connected to the bottom plate, and simply nudged into the adjoining room...This is a supporting wall, by the way. James had to kick the wall back into place, and hammer it into its original position.

The new laundry area taking shape, with the mudroom/entry through the door behind.
(Plus a rare shot of James sans builder's crack!) We'll finish this area off with an
accordion door and some cedar siding we pulled out of the bathroom.

And then there were the floors...But that can wait for another day.

Beehive Compost System

We built several compost bins inspired by a design James found in a book ('Compost' by Ken Thompson). It's a stacking system involving several levels, built on a slant, with a wooden lip nailed on the inside, toward the bottom, so they stack neatly. Levels can be added as your compost pile gets bigger, and subtracted as it breaks down. The lid is just a similar nailed lip and a rope handle. We had a little bit of rope laying around...

We just slapped a coat of paint on these. Actually, it was one coat of paint followed by black spray paint. They are holding up OK. There's room for improvement on the design and execution here...some wax or tung oil maybe, or sturdier varnish, or two coats of proper exterior paint.

Here they are after their first coat of paint. There is also a dog standing
on a boat in this photo, because why on Earth would anyone crop that out?

A single section

The bins in use today, showing a small compost bin for 'finished' compost, a
larger bin used for daily food scraps, and a spare section awaiting use.