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.

Primed up, ready to go.

We did it. We finally buckled down and patched up all the holes, scraped off all the old paint, and primed our entire kitchen. Literally - we painted pretty much everything except the floor. And it is now all very bright!

Though, once again, Reagan got a little carried away scraping the window frames clean of their many layers of chipping paint, we were able to get a coat of paint on everything Saturday and Sunday evenings. Here's an example of just how gunky the windows got (and how they weren't able to be stripped totally clean):


And then we started priming:

You can see the very professional way that we covered the lights...with leftover NY Times delivery bags.

Ok, before we show you the totally primed shot, let me just remind you of how awful this kitchen once looked:

and

And now:

Very white! And clean!

The lights make the photo look a little yellow, but it's very nice, really. But don't worry, it's not going to stay totally white. We managed to choose colors to be painted next weekend! Trying not to be too yellow...again.

The cork sample (our floor) is sitting on top of the color we like for all the woodwork. The paint card is an off-white for the walls. The color to the left is (very) similar, but we promise the one on the right is so much better.

In other big news, we bought a sink this weekend! We still have no cabinets or counter in which to put it, but, eh, details.

And all the trimmings.

Progress! We now have lights! And woodwork! We're so close to the point of painting.

To have lights in the kitchen has turned it into a room we actually enjoy being in...even with the unfinished walls and floor. It makes cooking and using knives a lot more safe, in general, since we can see enough to get our fingers out of the way.

Our biggest accomplishment, though, has been completing the carpentry work of putting up the chair rail, cornice molding, and door trim around the new opening. Adam managed to figure out the miter angles and splicing methods necessary to make believe the larger door opening is original. Just kidding - that would be wrong.

Adam at his makeshift table-saw/workbench, complete with running water.

Lights and molding!

Another light and more molding!

Chair rail (and yet another light in the nook above the door).

More chair rail!

The door trim moldings on the sides are up, but since the header in this new opening is sooooo much bigger than it was before, we had to splice together some pieces to make molding long enough.

And done! It makes it a finished piece. Yes, the top piece is painted, but it will all get painted over eventually anyway.

What a ceiling!

Sorry, we watched Flashdance this weekend. But yes! We got our ceiling in! It took 2 days and our shoulders are sore, but the rain (and reign) of lead paint chips and mouse poop is over. We decided on tongue and groove boards - beadboard, actually, though we used the non-beaded side. And thank heavens our neighbors had a ladder we could borrow. Otherwise it would have been impossible.
In order to keep the new ceiling from falling on our heads at some unknown point in the future, we had to find the furring strips behind the plaster and add some screws where they cross the joists to reinforce them. Hopefully we did the right thing.


Our original plaster ceiling in all its glory (new light fixture boxes are in), with a few boards started along the end. We had to cut down each board and screwed them in a few places and nail them at others.

A close-up of the boards going in.

Reagan using the nail gun.

The boards marching their way across the ceiling. Cutting around the boxes for the light fixtures was a little tricky, but overall successful.

Done! The dinky old light fixture is still there, as it was the only light source for a while. But don't worry, its time on the new ceiling is very short-lived.

We had just enough to fill in the hallway area...only the last board is spliced together.

Weird, huh? It does kinda look like the floor is on the ceiling. But it will be painted white and hopefully look less cabin-like.

Walls are Nice.

It's amazing what a difference walls can make. We tried it, and we like it.

We got the kitchen sheetrocked! (Can sheetrock be used as a verb?) Just witness for yourself the many before and after shots:











This is all the crazy framework Adam had to create to be able to put sheetrock on that area and close it up.

It feels so nice and bright in here now that there are reflective surfaces! We still have a little more work to do on the walls, but first the ceiling must go in. We finally decided on some tongue-and-groove boards, which were delivered this weekend. It's going to be a very laborious process, but we'll post those photos when we have them!