FANCIER floors!

We have an actual floor in the kitchen! We finished installing the floating cork floor last night. Not only does it look really nice (especially compared to the lovely plywood floor that we had been living with), but it is soft and sounds nice. Since it's a floating floor, it'll still float and move a little bit until we get the baseboard down.

But now, nothing stands in our way of putting in our cabinets! Except for maybe the fact that we haven't ordered any yet.


Underlayment (foam) for the cork. You can see the metal edging strip we put down to frame the cork against the adjoining wood floors.


The cork going in...once we got started, it went pretty quickly. It just took us a while to figure out just how this very simple click-together system worked.


Adam did some very intricate cutting in order to get the panels to fit around the moldings. (Reagan's brain couldn't handle it.)


Halfway done last Sunday.


Lookin' pretty good, no?


After Monday night's work...which was done all by Reagan's self. (Yes, I even got it under the stove.) This just goes to show how easy this stuff is to put down.


After complete installation last night! Fiver likes the new floor, too.

It's especially good for wrestling.

Now we have to get another coat of sealant on it, then we can put the sink back temporarily. Trying to wash a large stock pot in the tiny bathroom sink has been a larger challenge than putting down the floor.

Fancy floors.

We got the central area of the dining room floor refinished this week, as well as the floor of the coat closet. Both of these are the original pine that is the same as what was refinished in the two rooms upstairs, and it's just a gorgeous warm, red color.

Since one would always have a fancy carpet in the dining room to go underneath the table, they used cheaper wood for the area that wouldn't be seen, and saved the better wood (in this case, the oak) for the edges. We think it actually makes a beautiful and interesting floor the way it is. We plan to strip the rest of the woodwork in the room and hopefully bring the trim and mantel all back to that warm pine color.


The newly painted walls and the refinished floor of the coat closet. It is now a much nicer home for our outerwear. (Try to ignore the scratch marks on the interior of the door on the right...we have no idea how they got there and prefer not to think about it.)

Paint!

After a grueling day of hard work with 3 parents' help, we got the kitchen painted (and 2 closets!). It's very exciting! (We're also a little high from all the paint fumes.) The woodwork still needs a second coat, but it's all clean and pretty. We really couldn't have done this work without the help, so thank you thank you Barbara, Mary, and David. Here are some photos of the progress:


Mary (Adam's mom) working on the walls.


Adam and his precision brush.


Mary (with added height) and David (Adam's dad) slaving away.


Barbara (Reagan's mom) hitting the trim.


Reagan getting frustrated with the edge of the cornice molding.


Light and bright! The colors, off-white and offer-white (a light tan), work well to make a bright and airy kitchen.


The ceiling looks awesome, if we do say so ourselves, except for the one spot that David missed. Next time we'll take the photos with the hanging lights off so they don't make the room look orange.

Additionally, the coat closet in the kitchen and the guest room closet on the 2nd floor got new paint jobs. We decided it's too gross to store our clothes in a musty, dusty, dirty little room. So we fixed that. The coat closet was no big deal, but the bedroom closet was a lot more difficult than expected. This was largely due to the tendency of the paint on the walls to wash off. Calcimine paint is common in historic homes, and it is basically made of chalk and glue, which, by itself, will not peel, but anything you put on it will. That's why all of our ceilings are losing their paint.

Anyhow, so it was a messy process to prep this closet, but we used the leftover paint from our bedroom to brighten it up. Hopefully it will not peel off until after we have moved out...


Barbara working in the closet.


The closet primed, but still fairly unsightly.


Painted with the shelves put back in.


Ok, so this is an unexciting photograph, but how do you capture a closet, really? But it's nice and clean, and we feel much more comfortable storing things in there now.