Floors & Stairs

Well, hello there. Two days in one week. I'm just as shocked as you are. Writing the post for the o​ffice made me remember how much I enjoy writing for the blog and documenting our trials and tribulations. Down the road, I imagine it'll be fun looking back to remind ourselves of the progress we made. Without further ado, two more before and afters...

The Floors.
You may have noticed these beauties in the office pictures. One of the first things we did after moving in (well, technically two months after moving in) was have new hardwoods installed throughout the first floor. When we took possession of the house, there were five different types of flooring, six if you count the plywood, yes, plywood.

1. Original hardwood in the front bedrooms
2. Newer hardwood in the front entryway and area outside the kitchen
3. Tile #1 in the kitchen
4. Tile #2 in the family room 
5. The most disgusting, stained, stinky carpet I've ever seen before in the back bedroom, now office

Here you can see: Kitchen Tile, Newer Hardwood, Plywood, and Family Room Tile

G$ and I (ok, entirely G$) did all the demoing of the existing flooring. I got outfitted in the safety gear for the photo-op, then let G$ finish it. How nice of me. :)

Making it look like I did the demo

The fun of floor demo.  The original hardwood floors were installed in 1953 with old school nails.  We saved them, so I need to figure out something cool to do with them. 

We did the demo, but for the sake of both time and staying married, we opted to pay to have the floors installed.  Since there were so many types of flooring and we were dealing with an addition, we had to have 5/8 inch plywood installed throughout to level the floors before the installation. I'm not going to lie, but even the consistent plywood throughout looked better than what was there when we bought the house. Plus it was clean!

Nice, level plywood subfloor

Between the plywood and the hardwood, it took the installers about three days to complete. When they were finished, we had beautiful new hand-scraped hardwood floors. I don't think I've ever been so giddy. I could finally walk barefoot in my own house again! Without fear of the previous owners' filth or tiny pieces of broken tile getting all over the bottom of my feet.

Installation

A little before & after

Ahh, beautiful!

The Stairs.
Now that our beautiful hardwood floors were installed, it made the golden oak stairs look really out of place. I had seen numerous blog posts (are you noticing a theme here...) where folks re-stained/painted their stairs with the two-tone effect -- white risers and railing spindles/balusters with dark (stain or black paint) on the tops of the stairs. Each and every one's only regret was that they didn't do it sooner. I was sold!

I decided to take off the two days after Christmas, so with the weekend, it gave me four days to tackle the project. Three weeks later, I finally finished. Although, it was a painful, tedious process that took way longer than I estimated (that always seems to happen!), every time I see the completed stairs, I get a huge smile on my face, so it was 100% worth it.

Before & After

I'll quickly walk through the steps, but I'd recommend checking out any of the above blogs for detailed instructions:

Step 0. Hang plastic to keep the mess somewhat contained

1. Sand -- what a mess it made! Luckily, since I was painting the risers, I really only had to thoroughly sand the tops of the stairs. Lightly sanded the risers and sides so the paint would adhere. 
2. Strip -- Getting the stain off the little nooks and crannies with Citrustrip.
3. Sand again -- More mess
4. Stain tops of steps, doing every other step, so we could still access our bedroom, which is upstairs. Carrying Kairo up and down when a fresh coat was applied right before bed was fun. 
5. Dry. Stain other half of steps.
6. Dry. Apply polyurethane to tops of half the stairs. Luckily, I bought the kind for floors, which only recommended two coats. 
7. Dry. Reapply.
8. Apply poly to other half of the stairs. Dry. Reapply. Are you getting that it's a very lengthy stinky process... the fumes.
9. Allow poly to cure per instructions.
10. Tape off freshly stained tops, so they don't get white on them. Oh, the taping! I hate the taping. With a passion. 
11. Apply primer to risers and sides and spindles.
12. Dry. Apply paint to risers sides and spindles.
13. Dry. Apply second coat of paint to risers, sides, and spindles.
14. Remove tape and notice where the tape failed you. 
15. Fix where tape failed you -- still in progress in some areas... (guilty) 

In Progress, every other step stained

Sticky notes so we knew which steps to step on. Sanding the railing.

See what I mean about this being such a drastic improvement?!?!

Ahhh, love it!

And as I was going through pictures for this post, I ran into this fun picture from the beach with my family. We were in the Outer Banks for Memorial Day last year, right before our floors were installed.

Kairo and my beautiful niece Ally on my lap.

<3
K$

I'm baaaaaaaaaack!

Hello!?!? Anyone out there still reading?!!? I know of a few faithful readers who check the site periodically and then give me a hard time for not posting updates. We'll see how long it takes you guys to see this post. 

Well it has almost been a full year since we closed on our house. 11 months since we moved in. We have made some tremendous progress in those 11 months, so I figured it was a good time to post some before and after pictures. I love a good side-by-side before and after. Nothing makes me feel more accomplished. :)

I'm going to start with my favorite areas of our house and will spread this over a few posts. Get excited to see some action on the ole blog!

The office.

Before & After

We knew from the beginning, this back bedroom, which is right next to the family room, would be turned into an office. G$ works from home on Fridays, and unlike me, isn't a fan of working from the couch. G$ also has a ridiculous number of books and has always wanted a library of sorts, so we knew that built in bookshelves were going to be a must in the office.

Sidebar: Notice how I'm refraining from calling this G$'s office. I put a lot of sweat equity into the office, so I don't just want to hand the credit over to G$. 

I had read numerous blog posts about folks who hacked IKEA bookcases to make them look built in, so that's exactly what we did. I spent way too many hours putting together the plan using graph paper with room dimensions and bookshelf dimensions. It was tricky because of the room layout -- windows on two walls, a closet door on a third wall, and the entrance door opened onto the only wall with nothing on it. This meant that a simple wall of built-ins like all the blog posts showed wasn't possible. Luckily, IKEA's Billy Bookcases had a corner brace attachment piece to make three bookcases into a corner bookcase -- those Swedes really think of everything! 

After figuring out all the pieces we needed, we made the trek out to IKEA to buy everything for the bookcases, plus some other items I wanted for some other areas of the first floor.  After losing a curtain rod out the open hatch of the car while getting onto the on-ramp of 95 (whoopsie!), we made it home safely with all seven bookcases, plus top extender pieces since our ceilings are higher in the back of the house. Let the fun begin!

Here's me assembling the shelves.  Did I mention how much I love IKEA?!?

After all 14 pieces were assembled and secured to the walls, I measured for the baseboards and the crown moulding and off we went to The Depot, our favorite place in the whole, wide world. Installing it was a tag-team effort with G$ -- I would measure the piece, G$ would make the cuts with the mitre saw, I would take it back in and install with the nail gun. 

Sidebar: Nail guns are awesome. :)

Sometimes some additional tweaking was necessary, shaving a bit off, etc., but once we got into the groove for the baseboards, we finished in no time. Then it was onto the crown moulding for the top of the bookcases. This is where we wasted a whole board, I kid you not, trying to get the cuts right. The first outside corner cuts were easy, but when we got to the inside angles for the corner, neither one of us could figure it out. We both were beyond frustrated. G$ called his dad over to provide some assistance. With three minds working together, we finally figured it out. And, of course, we were over complicating it. With the little "test" pieces for each type of cut made and marked with the appropriate saw positions, we were ready to finish this thing! And that we did.

Kairo posing next to the mitre saw

After the moulding was installed, it was time to move onto the board and batten effect on the bottom half of the wall. I again, spent hours figuring out the perfect layout based on the length of the walls and the width of the "batten" pieces, which is just lattice.  Since it's thin, with only a 1/4 inch depth, it doesn't stick out past the baseboards, unlike true "board" in "board and batten" would.  We pretty much followed almost the same process as Young House Love, but instead of doing a true board and batten top rail, we opted to go with an ornate chair rail. After another Home Depot trip, we followed the same process -- I measure, G$ cuts, I install. 

Wrote the lengths directly on the wall

Now that all the moulding and trim pieces were in place, it was time to move onto caulking. I now have a love-hate relationship with caulk. It's really amazing how it transforms a space from incomplete to complete. I oddly found the smoothing the caulk process a bit therapeutic like painting. The "hate" part of this relationship was due to the fact that every time I put the damn caulk gun down, inches of extra caulk would come seeping out while I smoothed. 

Last, but not least was finally painting.  As you saw from the IKEA assembly picture, I had already painted the top of the walls the navy blue (Benjamin Moore Gentleman's Gray matched to Behr Premium Plus Ultra Satin), but just used ceiling white on the bottom to cover the bright yellow.  The IKEA bookshelves were slightly off-white, or off-white compared to the existing trim.  To match it, I took one of the shelves to Home Depot and they colored matched it, perfectly.  I put a fresh coat of the IKEA white on the bottom half of the walls, as well over the seams I patched on the bookshelves (on the exposed sides where the top extender pieces attached to the top of the bookcase).  

Ah, the after!

There you have it, our first big project.

Still on the To Do List for this room:

• Paint or Stain Doors
• Paint Window Frames
• Buy Desk Chair -- current chair is one of our dining arm chairs
• Buy Rug -- I'm thinking cowhide
• Make Faux Roman Shades from Mini Blinds -- G$ currently has binders stacked to block the sun

Fabric for the Faux Roman Shades

 And to leave you with a picture of the K-Man enjoying his new Pottery Barn chair.  No, we are not letting our dog on a $2000 leather chair, it was actually a Craigslist find steal.

Just as cute a year later. :)

Thanks for checking in.  I'll try my best to keep this updated on a more regular basis!

<3
K$