Meanwhile, Back at the Ranch...

er...two-story, four-bedroom Tudor Revival, that is.

If Mom hasn't shown up in the blog much the last two weeks, it isn't because she's slacking. Okay, she's slacking on her Box House duties (just kidding, Mom), but that's because she's been working hard on a few updates at her other house, which is now on the market.

For thirty plus years, this was her sewing room:

Actually, I can't find a single picture of it. How is this possible? For thirty years this room was the epicenter of her creativity, where she made her quilts, her stuffed animals and dolls, and the occasional item of clothing for me or my brother (I was the only kid on the block with Holly Hobby jeans. Those were good jeans). What you'll have to picture for yourself is a room cobbled together with mis-matched, second-hand furniture; cabinets; boxes stacked floor-to-ceiling with fabrics or sewing books; and an assortment of finished and half-finished and with-luck-she'll-one-day-get-a-chance-to-finish-it projects.

Three months ago, she began, with a mixture of excitement and bittersweet memories, to pack up the room in anticipation of the move. Unfortunately, there was no room to put the boxes, and so the packed boxes stayed where they were, in the center of the room, obscuring the qualities of late afternoon sunlight streaming through the window and the fact that this downstairs room could be a terrific office, sitting room, or even a fifth bedroom, as it has a closet--a rare find in these suburban-style homes. But all people could see were boxes and more boxes.

Mom's waving through what used to be a wall; shortly after Mom and Dad bought the house, they walled off this opening with two-by-fours and paneling to create her sewing room. The room was entered from the hall to the left (not visible in the photo). A few months ago, she took the wall out to open up the space to the living room. Any future owners have the option of closing off the space again.

Little by little, the boxes filled with fabric and mementos made their way to The Box House, but what their removal revealed was a well-worn vinyl floor, lifting in places and showing the sub floor in other spots. This was even more detracting to the potential buyer than the piles of boxes were.

Biting the bullet, we went to Lowe's in search of replacement vinyl tile. Having watched far more episodes of Curb Appeal, From Junky to Funky, Desperate Landscapes, and other DIY Network shows than is probably healthy, we knew that investing a few hundred bucks in re-doing this room would equal multiple offers on the house in an otherwise tough market. (At least, that's the plan.)

We got distracted by some of the other offerings at Lowe's--gotta get me that red washer and dryer--but we eventually found tile that is a match to what she already has in her kitchen. I think it's really the same stuff in a different package, and at 88 cents a tile on sale, it's a bargain to boot:

Mom rolled up and removed the last fragment of 1970s peach-colored rug that was left in the house; it had been at the bottom of the sewing room's closet.

Pulling up the old tile began in a deceptively easy fashion. The glue had long since lost its powerful hold and all we had to do was lift 'em right up and stack 'em in a pile. We were laughing at the ease of it, high-fiving and congratulating ourselves on what would be a fast makeover. The ones in the center of the room, however, must have been glued down by Satan himself. Right where Mom's sewing chair rolled back and forth over the decades, the tiles had melded together with the wood so that they were now one entity. Pulling them up (I'm not having as much fun as this picture demonstrates) was rough, especially when all I was using was a small, bent-angle scrapper. (The bulk of the tools are packed in boxes at The Box House.)

It took 20 minutes to pull up nine tiles, and a few splinters of subfloor came up with them.

Hi ho, hi ho, it was back to Lowe's we did go. This time, we picked up some floor filler and leveling compound to take care of the rough spots. While I was supposed to be working on that, Mom painted the room with a fresh coat of cream-colored paint. (I slacked; having rented the first disc of last season's Lost, Ted and I watched that instead. We're always a year behind on shows.)

Well, Mom painted three walls of the room cream before she ran out of paint. The final can from Home Depot was not the creamy magnolia goodness we were expecting, but mint green. An odd mistake, and one we were surprised we didn't notice. But what's more strange is that it is the exact shade of the fabric blinds in her room. So, mint green the fourth wall is; it looks good, and don't believe anyone who says we didn't plan it that way from the start.

With the walls freshly painted, the floors cleaned and prepped with a skim coat, and a new chalkline snapped, we laid out the tile:

Or that was the plan for today, at any rate. The floor is still naked to the subfloor. The realtor called to say she was bringing over a potential buyer to look at the house. So instead of prepping, snapping, and laying, we piled all our boxes, paint, and flooring supplies in the middle of the room and went out to the hell that is the mall on a Sunday so they could look at the house. Humph. How frustrating to have people look at the house when you're trying to get it ready to sell.

Ripping Out the Ugly, Toxic Carpet

We tackled our first real project at the Box House yesterday: removing the carpet in all of the Floor 2 bedrooms. (There was no carpeting on floor one, thank goodness.) We narrowed down our search for floor finishing experts and have a team coming out later in the week to completely sand and refinish the floors upstairs and down, with the exception of the kitchens and bathrooms. To save money we decided to tear out the carpet ourselves.

We had visions of the entire project taking only a few hours for the three rooms. I had picked up The Black and Decker Complete Photo Guide to Home Improvement and it looked straightforward enough. Step 1) Rip up carpet and padding, Step 2) Throw said carpet and padding away.

Uh-uh. It was a lot tougher than those photos made it look. Our carpets were glued down in some rooms and in others we had to remove literally hundreds of staples because some previous contractor had gone staple happy.

Here's what we started with. (Click to view larger images.)

Bedroom one is off the living room. The quarter round piece of trim that you see was an unfinished piece just sitting in the gaping crack where settlement had pulled the wall out slightly. We'll have to fill that in later...with something...when we redo that trim.

Bedroom two is off entryway and next to the bathroom.

Bedroom three, the smallest of the bedrooms, is off the kitchen. It's so small that I had to stand in the kitchen to take a picture.

My job was to pull up the carpet, cutting it into thin strips that we could then roll up and stuff into construction garbage bags. I used a carpet cutter for the task. We both wore face masks rated for dust and mold, as there was clouds of nasty stuff coming out of the carpets as we moved them. Underneath each one, there were piles and piles of dirt and grit. Whoever invented wall-to-wall carpeting was evil. I don't think your standard household vacuum cleaner can ever get them clean enough and when people have carpets installed, they tend to stay there for decades. Unless you never use a room, carpets tend to look shabby within a few years, in my opinion. Give me hardwood floors and easy-to-swap-out oriental rugs any day.

While I was doing that, Ted pulled up the tackless strip--a stupid name, considering there are thousands of pin-sharp tacks along its length. I guess it's tackless because you're not supposed to need additional carpet tacks to keep your carpet in place. Each tackless strip was nailed down to the floor about every two inches or so with way more nails than needed to keep it in place. He used a molding pry bar to pull it up, but the wood strips were old and weak and kept splitting, making for a rather grueling task.

As Ted was finishing up with the tackless strips, doubling back to pull out all the nails, I began cutting and rolling the carpet pads. This was the worst part of the entire project. In bedroom one, it looked like it had sort of melted to the floor or was glued on in patches. It did not want to come up, and rather than rolling it up in neat strips, I had to tug it up in patches. It was stapled to the floor along the seams, so when I got to those parts I needed to get a hammer and use the nail puller end to pull out each staple, which was held in place with gummy, semi-decayed padding. Ted helped after he finished with the tackless strip. "This is as close to someone else's old carpeting as I think I ever want to be," he said. I agree. We had to work on our hands and knees, peering at the floor from mere inches away as we searched for rogue staples. Thankfully, we had our masks. And the padding in the other two bedrooms came up pretty easily.

Here are a few more intermediary stage picture:

Bedroom One

Wallpaper sample found behind a radiator.

Ted in bedroom two.

Clean-up took a long time as we bagged trash (nine bags in all) and swept out the rooms. Bedroom one with the glued down padding took the longest. I didn't have a floor scraper, as recommended in the Black and Decker book for removing gummy stuff, so I used a putty knife/paint scraper instead, gently running it along each floorboard to pull up as much gunk as possible.

What we ended up with were floorboards of three different colors. I think the original color of the stain was medium-dark, as seen in the next photo. The floors in bedroom two were sanded and not restained before putting the carpet down. Why would they sand first? I have no idea.

Bedroom one--cleaned of all the goo.

Bedroom three--looking good!

Bedroom two--all ready for a light sanding!

By the time we were through -- six hours later -- we were exhausted and starving. With nothing in the refrigerator and unwilling to cook anyway, we headed out in search of fast food. Thank goodness we're only a few blocks from the border with Chicago and all the late night and late late night restaurants that can be found on Clark Street. Although it was two in the morning, we founds a 24-hour place serving burritos as big as our heads. Really, I know we shouldn't be eating this stuff, but it was soooooooooooooooooo good. Heck, I think we earned it.


I can't wait for the sanding guys to get here this week!

Please don't feed the dust bunnies.
—Author Unkown

Two More Flooring Contractors Visit the Box House

In our continuing quest for floor sanding options, we had two more contractors come in for an estimate in hopes of finding a midway point between the previous bids. Both of the companies that came in were top-rated on Angie's List, with what seemed like reasonable prices and lots of A+ reviews.

We liked the first guy quite a lot; he seemed to know his stuff and answered all our questions. He was here for about 15 minutes, and gave us a quote that seemed pretty decent. We liked that he could provide that on spot without having to go back to his office and crunch numbers.

The second guy provided more of a "presentation," explaining a bit about the sanding process and what we can expect as a result. He even had this nifty little laser tool for measuring rooms, rather than a standard tape measurer. (I have got to get one of those!) He brought a color chart, and based on the samples, I think we like the DriFast Special Walnut by Bona. It's an oil-modified quick drying stain. It's not too dark, not to light, and has a reddish cast to it.

This contractor also discouraged us from doing too much. The floors in the upstairs unit had been recently sanded by the Previous Owners, but we're not particularly happy with the results. He cautioned us that there is a limited number of times you can resand floors, so if we can live with it, that's what he would recommend, thus saving us some money. But he did also say he could probably buff those floors rather than fully sand them, and stain them a color we want rather than the yellowish color it is now. We'll most likely do that; as we will have to rip out the remaining carpet in the bedrooms and sand those rooms, I'd like all the floors to all match.

Most contractors have recommended doing only two coats of polyurethane, and this guy was no different. When we asked about a third coat, explaining that we have a dog and will soon have cats, too, he said he could do it, but it would not be the best use of our money. Then he told us that the stain coat is a sealant coat, and that the more top coats you have, the easier it will be to detect traffic patterns over time, as it will wear much differently. He said the coats are good for only 5 to 7 years anyway, and that we can always just buff the surface and reapply extra layers when we felt it was necessary. He was the only contractor to tell us that.

He did seem a bit concerned about the damaged floorboards in the downstairs dining room. He asked permission to lift one out to inspect the damage, thinking that it was termites. (Yikes!) It's only a few boards, and they look almost dry rotted. He was able to break a piece out pretty easily. He kept asking us if we had had the building inspected before purchasing it, which of course we had, and by someone who knows termites pretty well. I'm not sure what caused the damage, but I doubt it was insects. The building is solid brick, the foundation is concrete for 2/3 with brick above the ground, where the basement windows are. There's no exposed wood, and these floorboards are in the center of the house. Even so, after the contractor left we went into the basement to examine it from below. The great thing about the Box House is that much of its bones are visible or easily accessible. We pulled aside some of the ceiling panels in the basement and looked at the underside of the floor from below. Nothing.

So, now we're waiting for the last guy's quote to roll in, and will hopefully be able to make a decision by Monday.

Floor Sanding Options

Today we had a couple of flooring contractors come to the Box House to give us estimates on what it would cost to sand and refinish the floors in both units, as well as the front entry stairwell.

The floors in the main rooms of the top unit (living room, dining room, entryway) were recently "done," but I'm not sure if it was a "professional" or one of the Previous Owner's family members. In any case, he or she didn't bother going under or behind the radiators. The wood there is quite dark, while the rest of the area appears to have only a thin coat of varnish over bare wood. (The stairs are the same way. They have pools of darker stain in the corners, but the rest of the tread is quite light.) The three bedrooms upstairs are covered in ancient carpet.

Living Room of the Top Floor Unit. Sure, it may look good at a quick glance, but what you don't see is how the floor's only protected with a very thin layer of varnish. We also want to get it back to the original color, which is a little darker.

In the downstairs unit, the floors hadn't been sanded at all. Most of the floor downstairs is in decent shape--certainly better than many of the rental units I lived at in my younger days--but there are several boards that will have to be removed and replaced due to previous damage. Boards near a radiator in the bedroom off the kitchen appear to have water damage, and there are holes in the floor of the dining room. There's also a large dark stain we believe to be cat urine, but from what the contractors told us and what I've read on other house blogs, we may be stuck with that unless we replace those boards, too.

Both contractors who stopped by had been recommended by our buyer's agent. J.E. had previously recommended a mortgage broker and a lawyer who we were very pleased with, so we're willing to start with his recommendations here.

The first guy gave us an excellent price, one we can certainly live with, and even said he'd rip out and haul away the gawd-awful carpeting and replace the damaged boards for free. His quote included two layers of varnish; if we wanted more, it would cost more. But even then, it seemed a good price. However, there is a major language barrier and he was only here about 10 minutes or so. I'm not entirely convinced he really saw the full scope of the project, and I'm not entirely sure what we'd be getting. For example, it was difficult to convey that we wanted the floors to be a color complimentary to the rest of the trim.

The second contractor was here for 45 minutes, and she went over every room in detail, discussing which boards should be replaced, measuring everything with her tape measurer, giving us a bit of history of old floors. (The most interesting thing I learned is that they are no longer able to get wood flooring at the same length as was commonly installed 80 years ago. One of the floorboards that needs to be replaced is over 15 feet long; they'll cut only the bad section out at a length that can blend in easily, but leave the rest in place.) She's to send us a full proposal by Monday. My gut tells me it won't be as good as the other, probably nowhere near as good. She's talking about having two crews out here for upwards of two weeks. I'm sure the floors will look spectacular, but will we be able to afford it?

There's always the option of doing it piecemeal, one unit at a time as we can afford it, but right now we have all of our stuff in the basement, and it would be easy to work on the floors. The other option is to do it ourselves. *Shudder*