From Hovel to Home

I am pleased to announce we are finally done refinishing the hardwood floors.  These floors are 60 years old and we were the first people to refinish or even maintain them so they were in rough shape.  It was a tedious, miserable project and I never want to do it again, but at least they finally look nice. Living Room - Before   Living Room - After   Living Room - Before   Living Room - After Front Hallway - Before Front Hallway - After   Back Hall - Before Back Hall - After Master Bedroom - Before     Master Bedroom - After Office - Before   Office - After Now that the floors are finally done we will be moving into the master bedroom, installing trim and then we can finally start work on the kitchen.

After another marathon weekend on the house we are looking better than ever.  Luke only works a half day on Fridays so he was already home and sanding the floor by the time I got off work. It took quite a bit of sanding to get the uneven boards level.  While Luke worked the drum sander I took care of the edges of the room and the stairway ledge.  Once the sanding was finished we built a dog barrier to keep Atlas off the bare floor.  Even a big malamute is afraid of a few things so we made a fence out of his nemesis: vacuums. We stained the floor on Saturday night.  The color is special walnut which is a little darker than I had originally planned on but looks very rich and warm.     We put our first coat of poly on the next morning before church.  We're using an oil-modified polyurethane so we were able to re-coat every two hours.  I sanded the floors between coats with a 240 grit on my electric drywall sander.  It'...

The blog quality is about to improve.  No, I'm not going to start proofreading my posts, but at least the photos will be getting better. Luke and I agreed to buy a camera that could take wide angle photos.  We are planning on selling the house ourselves and thought it would be nice to have better pictures.  Then my brother offered us his "old" camera that was too slow for outdoor photography.  Take a look a the difference. Old Camera- Floors New Camera - Floors  Old Camera - Kitchen    New Camera - Kitchen In addition to having a wide-angle lens the new camera also has twice the resolution and much better optical zoom so I can get pictures of Atlas hamming it up without spooking him by getting too close.   I have yet to read the owner's manual and figure out all the settings but I have a lot of lunch breaks to kill over the next few weeks.  Hopefully by the time I start making flyers for the house I'll have this came...