Rob took care of demolishing the kitchen, which involved not only taking down all the cabinets, removing the sink, and counter, but also knocking down the wall separating the kitchen from the dining room.
The photos make it look easy, but it wasn't. Midway through the wall knock-down, Rob stepped on an exposed nail that went almost all the way through his foot. This taught me two important things about myself: 1) I don't deal well with blood, and 2) I am useless in an emergency. After we rushed to the ER we realized that the spurting blood had subsided, so instead of a 12 or more hour wait at the ER we opted to head to a walk-in clinic for a teatnus shot. I must give a shout-out to Southbank Medical, the only walk in clinic I've ever visited that had no wait. You could actually... walk in! Well, more or less. Once Rob got his teatnus dose, we headed straight to Mark's Work Warehouse for some new steel-soled boots. Makes you wonder why we didn't do that before starting this whole thing, doesn't it?
The appliances we purchased weeks ago were delivered on Thursday, and luckily the delivery guys took away the old appliances.
The new cabinets were delivered, as well.
Meanwhile, with Rob in charge of the downstairs, I took on the hideous seafoam green carpet upstairs and on the stairway. The carpet and underpad had to be ripped up and removed to prepare the floors for refinishing.
I had many devices at my disposal to help with this.
The stairs took by far the longest. Please note my lovely yellow work gloves. I chose them because I thought they were cute. While I credit them with saving me from stabbing my fingers on countless nails and staples, if only had I known that they would stain my hands yellow. Sigh.
Once the carpet and underpad were removed, it was all loaded into the truck and taken to the dump. We are becoming very familiar with the dump.
In most places the hardwood underneath the carpet looked pretty good!
In other rooms? Not so much. This room had different underpad than all the other rooms, and the underpad somehow attached itself to the floor in many places. Eugh. But, it looks worse than it is - it will be sanded off before the floors are refinished.
Once the carpet was up, I was faced with the insane number of staples in the floor and the evil carpet tack surrounding each room.
I had to go over each inch of floor on my hands and knees pulling up staples, and then removing the carpet tack and nails with my handy wrecking bar. The net effect was like this:
Hallway with carpet:
Hallway with carpet and underpad removed:
Hallway with staples and carpet tack removed:
Meanwhile downstairs, with the kitchen demo complete, it was time to rip up some tile. The first device we rented for this purpose just didn't cut it, so Rob had to break out the big guns. Please meet Robs new best friend, The Demo Hammer.
The tile was up and gone in no time.
The floor has been scraped, and the new tile is ready and waiting to be installed on Monday.
Other work accomplished this weekend: All baseboards have been removed on the second floor (I am a machine with that wrecking bar, people) and I also removed all switchplates and outlet covers in preparation for painting. We'll be replacing the switchplates and covers with nicer, new ones once painting is complete, and we (and by we I mean someone who is not me) will be installing new baseboards once the floors have been refinished.
The front garden, which was covered with snow when we last saw the house is a bit... in need of care.
But, ever helpful, Patrick and his friend Natalie went to work on it. With their hard work (with a bit of help from Julie and Derek, hee) the jungle was gone in no time.
All in all, a succesfull, but exhausting, weekend that included two trips to the dump, one trip to the ER, one teatnus shot, and approximately eighty-seven trips to home depot. We got everything ready for the tile guy to start on Monday, and the second floor is almost prepped for painting. I just have to remove a wallpaper border from one room, and then I'll start taping.
But for now, we rest.
Wow! What a difference already. Your floors are going to be incredible. Mark got his steel toed boots during the first week of renos too.
ReplyDeleteI can't wait for the next update.