Is hardwood floor supposed to elicit involuntary moaning?

Because it does. Every time I walk up my stairs and see all the glorious flooring installed, my heart just goes pitter-pat. I can't help it. You probably haven't lived in a house with mostly bare subfloor before. You're probably not a godless heathen savage with a bone in your nose, and those are the people who don't have floors. Bad people. Maybe cannibals. And I was living like them for over a year. No flooring in pretty much my entire upstairs area. I was like Jane Goodall. I wasn't completely feral, but I was neighbors with feral.

But now, everything is shiny and new. I'll show you.

We finished the master bedroom and then moved into the closet. Let me tell you, my dad and I are getting pretty brilliant with working around doorways. We've got some downright gorgeous transitions going. You know, now that we're done and will never have to do them again.

You can see that we exchanged our old "drill, then hammer a nail in, then set it with a nail set" approach for the newer, sleeker, faster "pneumatic finish nailer" method. That saved us so much time, you don't even know.

Ta da! All done in there. Now for the hallway.

The little linen closet to the left was going to cause us problems, because our starting line was along the wall that's at the top left. So we had to start there to get our straight baseline, then work backwards into the closet. That ended up being a relatively minor problem, overall.

It just involves a lot of face nailing (not as painful as it sounds) and a lot of subsequent countersinking and hole filling (not as fun as it sounds).

There we go. Finished closet floor. Now, on to the rest of the hallway.

We just had to work our way down, much like we usually do in the rooms, except the narrower sections meant there was a larger ratio of face-nailed rows to tongue-nailed rows in the hallway. It's kinda sucky, but i don't know a good way around it, unfortunately. We tried nailing through the tongues of the boards with the finish nailer, but just weren't able to get consistent results.

We turned the corner, and this bit was next.

It actually didn't take all that long to do, though. That's the nice thing about spaces that run perpendicular to the boards. A lot more tongue-nailing makes everything go faster, both immediately and in the cleanup stage.

Now that's finished...

And that's finished! The bottom left section that doesn't have a board in it is intentionally left blank. We aren't yet sure about what we want to do with our stairs, so we're remaining undecided for now, and leaving our options open. But that's a whole lot of wood floor in there now. And it looks great, and it feels great. It looks like a real, actual house. Once we get baseboards on it, that's just going to blow my tiny mind.

Also, figured I'd show a picture of the new bath rugs my mom got for us. They're very nice, and bring the gray color into the mix. The master suite is going to be all color coordinated, because we're super awesome.


That's all for now, folks. Thanks for reading!

D-O-N-E is maybe my favorite four-letter word

The bathroom is done. Done done done! All inspections signed off, all work complete. Everything. We literally have nothing left to do with it. Except use it. But that's going to feel almost weird now. You know what I mean? it's been in pieces and just torn out for over a year now. There was a part of me that never really believed I would have a bathroom. We might as well just fill that space up with mothballs and sawdust, because there's no way it's ever actually going to be functional. But now it is. And it's beautiful, too. And soon, we'll be done with the floor in the master bedroom and we can actually move in and start living there. That's the craziest part, really. We'll be living in our whole upstairs soon, instead of just one room. I won't know what to do with myself, for real.

Actually, I will. Because that's just the upstairs. And we have a main floor to see about. Speaking of which, the kitchen is our next step, outsourced-project wise. We're bringing in the same guy who helped us finish our bathroom to do the kitchen as well. We've got a limited budget and a limited schedule, so we're hoping to bang this one out pretty quickly. Here's roughly what we want to do:

This is how it looks now. Except not that clean. See the far right lower cabinet? We're going to expand in that area. So here's a quick sketch i did of the new plan for what's going to happen next to the dishwasher. First, from the other side:

Make sense? The left side will be up against the dishwasher, making this into sort of a peninsula. The double cabinet in the middle is actually the existing cabinet, so the small one on the left and the drawer stack on the right are both completely new additions. Here's the back:

So we have that cool curve on the back, which will give us enough overhang to slide some stools up there if we want. We also end up with another cabinet on the back, where we can store our small kitchen appliances. They're kinda clunky and awkward and many of them are varying degrees of heavy, so having them more easily accessed will be awesome. That will also free up more space in our pantry and some of our upper cabinets. Score, right? I'm alos loving all of the additional counter space I'll have. Finally, a nice big swath of countertop to prepare food on, where I won't be obstructed by overhead cabinets or other clutter.

So there you go. That's the plan. I'm jazzed. Thanks for reading!

Floors upon floors

We're still doing floors. Yeah, that's as exciting as it sounds. Still, things are looking great! Here's some pictures of our recent progress:

This is the master bedroom floor, prepped for paint.

Now, it's painted. That oil-based primer really seals the floor, but it also really makes you hallucinate. So I guess that's a trade-off.

Now, there's foam underlayment. Woot. And one row of boards way on the other side of the room. That's the end of day 1.

Making progress...

And the end of day 2. That's a lot of freaking floor to put in.

We also had to have the drywall guys come back and tape the joints of the new drywall they put in, since it looks like they forgot to do it the first time. Now we have to paint over it.

Going...

 Going...Still there. I haven't gotten around to fixing it all, unfortunately. I'll get it, though.

Bathroom: Complete. We still have a little bit of cleanup and the like to do, but nothing major. All the bits and pieces are done, though.

All the mirrors and lights are installed and looking good.

We even have our badass under-sink rollout trays. Awesome, right?

So there you go. That's the state of the house right now. More to come soon, I'm sure. Thanks for reading!

So much flooring

This weekend, we really got to hammering out some big projects. My mom and dad have been great, working tirelessly on things while Jenna and I are at work. There are a couple projects that really just needed a concentrated effort by the whole team to accomplish, though, and so we got to work.

We started by rolling out the green foam underlayment, as per usual. The room is a pretty simple shape, so this went relatively quickly.

Finished with all the underlayment. Now time to put down some planks!

The first few rows take a long time with all the measuring and tweaking and all, but once you get out into the room a bit more, it speeds up.

That's where we stopped the first day. We got about halfway through the room in something like 8 hours. We may be slow, but we do good work.

This is the face of a man pointing to the last piece of flooring in a room. Pure, unadulterated joy. maybe adulterated a little with exhaustion, but that's to be expected.

My mom also got the ceiling in the master bedroom painted, and it looks awesome. It took at least one coat of primer and two coats of paint (so far) to cover up this mess:

Yeah. For reals. You remember the glossy green on all the walls and the ceiling? I do. But hopefully I'll be able to forget.

So let's see...what else? Oh yeah, garage update. Here's where we stand at the moment:

Not too shabby, eh? I'm pretty pleased.

That's it for now. We've got a lot more work ahead of us, but we're making big progress. I'll keep you posted, of course. Thanks for reading!

Nearing Completion

We've stalled a bit, but things are very close to being done. Here are some pictures:

I know, right?! It looks like an actual for real bathroom now.

There's the countertop and shelf stack. The left mirror wasn't installed at this point, but it's in there now.

We love our cabinets!

And we've always wanted these birdcage drawer knobs. I think the brushed nickel looks amazing next to the dark wood.

Those are our towel hooks. And me looking serious in the mirror.

That's where our hand towels will be. Ingenious, right? My dad came up with it and we love it.

And those are our light fixtures. We managed to find some that really feel like they match the overall aesthetic of the bathroom.

So there you have it. Big progress on all fronts!