401 Update: Floors

So I've finally pulled myself together enough to sit down to write about the floor situation in Salida. A few disclaimers before I get started:

1- Under no circumstances is it ever okay to put carpet down in a kitchen.
2- Under no circumstances is it ever okay to put carpet down in a bathroom.
3- Under no circumstances is it ever okay to put carpet down over other existing carpet in any room.
4- Under no circumstances is it ever okay to put wallpaper on a floor.

So those are the morals of this story. I thought it would be best to get those out in the open before I lead you down this terrifying path just so you can know that there is a purpose to this, there is a meaning to life, there is hope in the darkness, there is a reason for living. Do not fear what is to come. Though you may walk through the valley of the shadow of...blah blah blah. Okay enough pep talks. Let's get to it.

A few weeks back we committed to pulling up all the carpet in the house because, well, it's gross. After pulling up the living room, kitchen, front bedroom, and stairs, we decided that we needed to stop pulling before we pulled ourselves right into hell. Let me give you a quick run down of what we found in those rooms.

Living room: original douglas fir wood floor in bad/slightly bearable/reasonable condition. Livable, yes. "Weathered", but not in a cool blogger kind of way, more like just a gross sort of way.

Dining room: a strange type of tile that is made of asphalt and therefore melts like tar under any heat and therefore the current condition of them is somewhere between a swirly mess of 70's tile pattern (detail pic below) and deteriorating black muddy tar. There are some spots where the tile has deteriorated enough to show that in fact there was at one time hope in the world, and more importantly, unadulterated wood floor (you can see a few of those spots in the next image).

Front bedroom: floral wallpaper that had been glued to the original doug fir floors and then covered with wood-grain contact paper. I mean. There's just nothing else to say.

Stairs: under two layers of carpet runner and what can only be descrbied as some sort of carpet padding that was made of either a mixture of horse and dog and squirrel hair, or perhaps a "felt" of every type of human hair that exists on this planet (detail image below), the treads are not in completely unbearable condition.

Kitchen: there was a layer of carpet that was glued to a layer of mdf that was laid on top of a layer of sawdust that was used to level out the uneven wood floors that was then lined with a layer of local newspapers from 1929. Did you get all that? So under that are original wood floors but goodness they are completely shot to hell.

So after all of that, we told ourselves we needed to take a break and rethink our purpose in life. With much sadness and feelings of defeat and humiliation, we decided to leave the carpet in the back bedroom and landing on the stairs because we just couldn't take anymore. Upstairs, we took the carpet out of the bedrooms to unearth original wood floors that were in various states of "painted with brown lead paint" and "streaks of mildly-sanded brown lead paint". Fine, whatever, we'll just paint them. Then we started ripping up the upstairs bathroom. Because we are insane.

After two layers of carpet, there was a layer of some sort of foam moisture-wicking material that is laid on top of, well, we have no idea because we are still trying to chip away at that black foam goodness. After years of absorbing whatever it is that is to be absorbed on a bathroom floor, you can't just pull it up off the ground. It is just flaking apart and disintegrating into small particles of death when you touch it. So the only way to get it up is by attacking it with a paint scraper. At this point, we have just kind of shut the door and tried not to look at it very much.

So where do we go from here? An insane asylum, perhaps, but then to a place of hope! Believe it or not, we can see the light! We decided to have someone refinish the original doug fir floors in the living room, dining room, and bedroom. We have to pay a little extra money to have them remove whatever that terrifying asphalt crap is in the dining room but it will be worth it. So original wood floors! Thank the lord.

In the kitchen, we are trying to figure out a way to even out that floor as best we can and then lay simple black and white checkerboard ceramic tile. Classic and easy. We may have to upgrade to porcelain if we can't figure out a great way to even out those original wood floors but we're holding out hope.

We are going to paint the stairs--probably black treads with a white banister and white risers (or maybe something super fun like ombre risers!)--and call it a day.

Upstairs, we painted the bedroom floors white and they look amazing. Exactly what was needed for those tiny dark spaces! And once we paint all that wood paneling it will be downright dreamy. Okay probably not but we've got to stay positive.

We have no clue what we're going to do in the upstairs bathroom. Probably just keep the door closed. Forever.

So that's what we've got. Next update is gonna be walls. Slightly less terrifying, but still wildly entertaining, so stay tuned.

--mel

If you're just joining us on this little journey, you can catch up here:  

New Year, New Adventures  

401 Update:  Ceilings & Radon

401 Update: Ceilings & Radon

So it's high time for an update on our housing adventures in Salida. I'm going to break up the posts into different topics because if I put it all down here in one post, you might possibly get sucked into your screen like that episode of Doctor Who. So for today, we're talking ceilings. Here's a little review:  we closed on the house at the very beginning of April so we went down the first weekend and got right to work. The first order of business was tearing down the drop ceiling in the living room, dining room, and front bedroom. We decided to leave the drop ceiling for now in the kitchen and second bedroom because of the plumbing so we’ll just have to live with that for a little while. Luckily, the drop ceiling came down really fast and it was super simple. All the tiles just pop out of the metal frame individually and then the frame is just a lot of smaller metal pieces that are kind of just resting on each other and hung from the ceiling by metal wire. Once the ceiling came down it made an immediate impact. It was miraculous. Without the drop ceiling we gain almost two feet of ceiling space which is amazing. We still have to remove all the little hooks from the ceiling and the metal frame that is attached to the walls but that is all child's play compared to the other stuff.

 

So now the plan goes a little haywire. We were jumping at the idea that we would find an HVAC or ductwork specialist to come in and help us find a product that would allow us to move all the ductwork into the floor joists of the original ceiling. Then we would bring in a drywaller to replace the original ceiling which would now be containing all the ductwork and electrical. However, this plan went south after a series of unfortunate events. First, our drywall guy had a heart attack and had to be care-flighted to Denver. Needless to say, that puts him out of commission. Second, I lost the piece of scrap trash paper I was taking notes on that had the HVAC guy’s name and number on it so now I can't remember who I talked to or his number. Finally, we had a conversation with our radon mitigator & electrician who basically told us that plan sounded like a huge pain in the ass and we should rethink our options.

So now we are kind of floating back to our original plan to build a new ceiling right below the ductwork as it stands. Sure we won't get to keep all 11 or 12 feet of original ceiling, but we’ll still have gained about a foot and a half in height so it's really not a loss. Our radon guy told us about a ceiling he had built in another house in town and he took us over to see it and we kind of fell in love. It is a ceiling made of pvc ceiling tiles that have a pattern to make them look like old tin ceiling tiles. Shockingly beautiful and not corny. And the other plus is that the ceiling tiles are really light so we wouldn't have to build a big huge frame like we would for a new drywall ceiling, which would help us to keep as much height as we possibly can. Here are some pictures of that ceiling we're using for reference:

So two ceiling ideas currently that we are tossing over. Oh and I almost forgot to tell you about the radon mitigation! Super exciting stuff. Long story short our house tested super high for radon which is supposedly a huge cause of lung cancer so not something we want floating around our house. However, it's still sort of an issue like climate change where you see the science and it's super simple to see that it's a real problem but you still have your crazy naysayers walking around saying shit like, “I don’t really believe in radon.” Needless to say, we’re in the first camp so we wanted to knock that out immediately. Luckily we found the best guy ever to tackle our radon issue and he did an amazing job. When we bought the house it was testing at 13 for radon (the epa has set a normal range limit at 4) and now just a couple weeks later it is testing in between 1 and 2. Thank you for saving our lives, mr. radon mitigator. He had to completely wrap our crawl space up with plastic and then build a fan to blow out all the radon and install it on the outside of our house. The fan just continually blows for a year and then we test again to make sure the wrapping job he did on the crawl space is still containing the radon.  And just because he's the raddest dude ever, he also shored up the stairs leading down to our crawl space and reinforced some of our foundation while he was down there you know, just because. He is our hero. (Here's a picture of the crawl space and all the beautiful plastic wrapping that is covering the surface and containing all the poisonous radon and preventing us all from dying a slow and painful death; and in the next picture you can see the fan that has been installed in the right corner of the house.)

Okay that's enough for this update. Next I'll tell you about the floors. What a shit show.

xoxo

-mel