Guest Room inspiration: Family Heirloom

Okay, todays post involves even more planning. I guess we should start getting some of these things done! Planning is boring! BUT, we have been super busy with work. I didn't get home from work until 8:00pm last night and I was so exhausted that my dinner consisted a smorgasbord of junk: popcorn, semi-sweet chocolate morsels, pizza and walnuts [oh Ellie, you're so heathy! Gotta work on that]. Obviously no time to actually work on the house! So, instead more dreaming about it.

I have always wanted a bright white guest bedroom with a great big antique brass bed topped with a glorious white comforter. I know I couldn’t have this as my own room because it wouldn’t stay white. I’m not quite sure what I would be doing to tarnish it... I mean I don’t walk around with a cloud of dirt floating around me or anything, but most certainly the room would be brown very quickly.

In the new house we have the perfect room to turn into my dream guest room. It has two huge windows that I’m going to flank with white-white curtains. It is just the perfect size to center the brass bed under one of the windows and to drape the plush white comforter over.

The only problem is that two of the walls are currently deep grape purple and the molding is a dirty antique white. Painting over the purple is going to be a challenge!


[They are much worse in person, I swear!]

My plan is to paint over the hideous purple walls with a very subtle gray that most males would consider white. [To achieve this color, I literally went through the colors at Lowes and asked Matt which of the grays that I was holding he thought were actually white and I am using that one]. We came up with Valspar's Woodlawn Bedroom White.


[Valspar Woodlawn Bedroom White]

I have some old curtains from Ikea that I’m going to use to bring some soft texture to the walls. And I also have an old white duvet cover [that has never been used before-because it is white].

The missing piece to the puzzle was the gorgeous inspiration for the room. A brass bed! As luck would have it, my dad’s girlfriend has been storing an antique brass bed in the family’s barn for almost 5 years now. It is a family heirloom and means a lot to her. But it has just been sitting there staring at me for all this time. All I needed to do was to find a way to assure her that I would take the best care of it [because I would] and make sure she knew that she could have it back at any time. Plus it would be a permanent reserved guest room in our house, can’t beat that!

So after saying just that and letting her think about it for a couple of weeks, she said we could have it! I’m so grateful! I hope she knows that I will take such good care of it and hope that she will come and stay in it soon!



The bedroom has all of its pieces now it just needs to be put together. Let the painting begin! After some rest... ha!

Paint Color

Have you ever had one of those weeks where the days are going by so slowly but the week seems to be flying by. Does that even make sense? This week is like that for me. I'm still trying to catch up with things after our fun filled weekend and by the end of the day I'm too exhausted to do anything really mentally challenging, so I start playing around with house ideas... like picking out paint colors.

One of the biggest difficulties in getting a room painted for me is to actually pick out the color. I am terrible at this. In the past I have chosen some very bold paint colors and regretted them [the office in our old house was lovingly called the baby poo yellow room].


[Yuck!]

I wanted to avoid making any of these mistakes in the new house so we took a trip to the fabric store for inspiration for a scheme for the room rather than just picking the color that I like and then forming a room around that color.



Fortunately we are close enough to Lancaster, PA to be able to go to the Calico Corner's outlet and save bundles on Fabric.



They have an entire wall of remnants that they have marked down to between 10-50% of their original prices!

Matt and I spent about 2 hours digging through the remnants to find an inspiration fabric for each of the rooms in the house [and I'm sure I could have spent more if they had not closed!]

I had some idea of what the general color scheme was going to be for each room, but I wasn't 100% committed to anything, but I was pretty sure I wanted my master bedroom to have a soft green/cream scheme as inspired by the master bedroom from Sarah's House in the image below. [I'm obsessed with Sarah's House!]


[Source]

It just looked so soft and romantic that I wanted to replicate it in our master, but I had no such luck finding the same tones at the fabric store.

Time to come up with a new inspiration....

Longwood Gardens

Good evening everyone! Looks like we have almost made it through Tuesday! Yesterday went by in a blur. Like I said in yesterday's post our weekend was full of events, so while sleeping in on Monday was probably what the Dr. ordered, it didn't/couldn't happen.

Our "weekend" events started on Thursday night last week. As some of you locals may know Longwood Gardens has an amazing light show every summer and it ends next week. While it was on our list of things to do, we never found time to go over the summer and since the show was ending we knew we would have to go or we would miss out! So we booked tickets online for Thursday night [it sells out quickly so this is a must].

On the way, we took a little detour over to Woodside Creamery, a local ice cream spot with the most amazing treats! I had a sugar cone with the most decadent black raspberry ice cream and Matt got peach. Both flavors were great, but mine was so better than his, which never happens!! Don't worry I was nice and I shared!


[Woodside Creamery]

From there we headed strait to Longwood Gardens and were filed into one of the few remaining parking spots. We had hoped to arrive by 7:00, but we were running late and were only heading to the entrance at 7:40. We had also planned to have dinner at the gardens, the problem with that was the restaurant closed at 8:00 and a small ice cream cone does not qualify as dinner for me! So we ran over to the restaurant directly from the gate with 20 minutes to pick out our food and eat it in time to make it over to the fountain show. Fortunately, we up for the challenge and managed gobble down our food in time to get a good spot with only a few shoulders away from the prime viewing area for the show.


[Source]

The show way beautiful. It was a half our light/fountain show set to Rachmaninoff: Power and Passion. It was incredible how lights, water, and music were able to evoke so many emotions.

As time went by some of those shoulders that were blocking our view before left and we were left with the best view in the house for the final 5 minutes!

After the show was over we strolled through the park and looked at all of the other light displays. They were absolutely incredible!


[Forest of Lights]

By the time we had looked at all the displays it was 10:30 [well past my bed time, especially on a school night!!].

Well worth the trip, but I think next time I would try and get there a little earlier or have dinner beforehand, but that was just bad planning on our part! The show itself was spectacular!

Paint Sprayer Fiasco

Wow! We have a lot of catching up to do over here at Our Old Colonial. We were busy bumble bees this weekend and I can certainly feel it this Monday morning. But before we get to that, let's catch up on some house work!

A few weeks ago on a Wednesday, the plan was to simply start taping the house to get it ready for painting [with a paint sprayer] on Friday night. How long could this possibly take? That would give us plenty of time to get some gardening done too, right?

Well, let me tell you about it:

Wednesday night I taped a total of 2... yes 2 windows.



That only left 5 rooms to go... with a total of 8 windows with 16 window panes in each... but who is counting? I am! That is 128 window panes left and only 32 down....

Skip to Saturday afternoon [or 3 nights and 3/4 of a day of taping later] and we are still taping up and finishing covering all the furniture for the paint sprayer.

So, I was going to just lay this out for you real plane and simple: Don’t rent a paint sprayer or rather, Don’t rent a paint sprayer expecting to get the same result in a shorter amount of time.

But then I realized that you all out there might have better luck than we did with the paint sprayer and looking back on it now we may have had the wrong tools, but wow were we disappointed with the whole process!

Matt and I were so excited to paint all of our molding in a matter of minutes after watching several paint spraying videos on YouTube [just take a quick search over on google for: how to paint spray video].

But, after spending countless hours sealing up the house, we were already exhausted by the time we actually got the paint sprayer [this is a very important time consuming process they don't show in those stinking videos]. So, we were exhausted and then we started spraying...

We rented a paint sprayer:



And while I finished up with covering furniture and trying to stay awake, Matt started spraying.

We started in the office, because we were going to paint all of the paneling over and had taken out the carpet (so how could we mess this up right?).


[Remember the lovely office?]

Well, Matt started spraying and it looked GREAT! It covered the panelling right up!


[Wow! This is wonderful!]

Then we waited a few minutes and the walls began to melt. We had put too much paint on and should have been spraying a much lighter mist. But, it was too late. We were cranky and exhausted and didn't know what to do. So, as of now, we have the most beautifully textured walls in our office. I have since covered some of the worst spots with pictures, but we may be tearing down the panelling altogether in the near future. *sigh* At least it is the cheap plastic kind and I won't feel guilty about it, but that certainly adds another project to the already never ending list!

Meeting the Neighbors

One of the things that truly drew us to want to live our neighborhood was the sense of community and neighborly love that we felt in it.

You see, before we moved into our beautiful home, we would take Brady Pup on walks through the neighborhood that our old colonial was in [which was literally on the other side of the tracks from our rental]. It was such a beautiful neighborhood and everybody said 'hi' when you passed them on the sidewalk. It was as if the sun was always shining through the tree lined streets once we walked into the neighborhood.

After moving in, we really found out just how truly wonderful the neighborhood is. We received home baked goods and vegetables strait from our neighbor's gardens in the following weeks, we almost couldn't keep up eating everything because we were getting it was so much!

Well, the other night was just the icing on the already delicious cake. The other night we finally made it over to our neighbor's house across the street. They have been inviting us over since the day we closed on the house, but we were usually too covered in paint or dirt or something else to feel comfortable heading over. But, yesterday we didn't have any reason not to [not that we were in anyway shape or form trying to avoid going over] and when they invited us in to have some drinks and tapas on their patio we were more than happy to join them!

We spent nearly 4 hours out on their patio and left well past the sunset. We were regaled with stories of our neighbor's lives and what they have learned over their 80 years of living. They are celebrating their 50th wedding anniversary this coming year and they still flirt like teenagers.



I only hope that Matt and I are that happy and have as many stories as we are when we celebrate our 50th wedding anniversary in 45 years from now.

Pressure Washing

One of the first things we wanted to do to the house was to pressure wash the exterior. We were hoping that pressure washing the house would make it look new and shiny so that we can avoid painting the exterior.

We borrowed my father’s pressure washer to do the job. If we weren’t able to borrow my dad’s we were going to rent on from big box store #1, but luckily he was still up north on vacation and didn’t need the pressure washer any time soon [win!].



I started in the back of the house, which didn’t really need it, but I wanted to start somewhere that 1. nobody would see if I made a mistake and 2. Nobody would see me flying around from the force of the water [hey, I didn’t know how strong it was going to be!]. It turned out it was not that hard to control the water. I had to be about 6-12 inches out from the wall in order to get a result or I would have to go over the same spot several times.



The results on the side of the house were amazing!

We still need to get right above the front porch where the water has splashed and left a stain similar to the ones in the picture above. We can already tell that we will need to paint the pillars, but we’re still hoping we can avoid painting the entire house. But the house is already looking much better.

Bathroom Stencil

Thank you for all of the complements on the living room! It is certainly my favorite room in the house (mind you it is the only finished room in the house)! Now I'm starting to ponder what to do with the rest of the house.

I have been toying around with the idea of getting a really nice wall paper for the downstairs bath. It is a small bath and therefore wouldn’t require much wallpaper and I think I could get away with a really bold print. Like this one:



But, I am religiously against wallpaper because it always goes out of style and I hate taking it down.

So after perusing on pinterest and etsy I found a potential solution:



A stencil! Rather than committing to a wallpaper forever, I can stencil a pattern on the wall and when I don’t like it anymore, I can paint over it! Brilliant!

They also have a lot of bird stencils that could give the same feel as the above wall paper:



Lots to think about!

Paint Living Room: Check

After several hours of painting, then deciding I needed to tape in if I didn’t want to ruin the floor, then taping, and then painting some more we are finally finished painting the living room.



Here is the before:



Drum roll please!!!


[After]

We went with [paint #3] it is Valspar’s Homestead Resort Cameo White.

I am in love with this room. I am still have to make curtains, hang some pictures that I got from Etsy and we are still trying to find a grand picture for above the fireplace. But I love how warm it feels with the hardwood floor and the new paint color.


[Colors]

What do you think?

Piano Movers

So you remember that [elephant in the room]? Well, it is gone. After hanging out with the piano for 2 weeks after closing, the sellers arranged for it to be donated to a local music school.



We were a little bummed that we did not get to keep it. You see, when Matt and I were first dating he used to play the piano and sing to me [what a romantic :)]. Well, with the piano in the house he started up again. So we offered to buy it from the sellers, but they wanted more than what we could afford and so it went to the music school.

Two weeks later, the piano movers came at 7:45 in the morning and let me tell you! Piano movers are something else! They came in, took at look at it, said “ready” and picked it strait up to put on their dolly. They were gone in 5 minutes!

Have a great weekend! And don't forget to vote on our paint colors!

Life: The swim cap

You know when you have just one of those days. Those days where you definitely got up on the wrong side of the bed and then immediately stepped on something or bumped your head because you were in an extremely groggy state and then things just kept going wrong all day.

I just had one of those days. I definitely got up on the wrong side of the bed (or at least the unfamiliar side of the bed since we just moved around our bedroom furniture).

My day started at 5:40 when I hopped out of bed to get to the pool early to avoid having to swim laps too long with the young whipper snappers that were getting to use the pool at 6:30. I had all of my things ready except for my swim cap which was hidden somewhere in the mess of stuff that we had moved and sealed up to paint.

Matt and I spent twenty groggy minutes looking for the darn thing and realized if I didn’t leave soon I would certainly have to share a lane with one of those twig-like-micheal-phelps-wanna-bes and choke on water from their obnoxiously-strong-fast strokes. So I left sans-cap and annoyed that I got up early only to be late.

I groggily biked over to the pool, jumped out of my shorts and t-shirt (in the locker room), grabbed my towel and water bottle, and headed to the pool only to find the pool door locked (this was annoying just because at this point everything was). However it wasn’t that big of a surprise because they are doing renovations at my gym and it has been locked before, so I went around to the other (farther away) door. Locked. After putting back on my shorts and t-shirt (I am not one to walk around in a swimsuit when I don’t have to), I headed back up the stairs to look at the pool through the windows and it was only half full.

That's when I realized I probably should have read that email the swim-coach-cordinator-guy sent out the week before a little more carefully instead of just reading the part that forewarned us that the young whipper snappers would be joining us in the pool at 6:30. Because as I found out later, we had been moved to a different pool all together, one that was too far to bike to and I would have been very very late at this point.

I groaned and biked back home, put on my running shoes and went on a short run. I was going to be late for work, there was no way around that, and I knew I would feel better all day if I at least got in a good run.

After the run, I headed into work and had a mediocre morning. I was annoyed and exhausted by the events of the morning and little things were more irritating than normal. But not such a big deal over all.

Then around noon I got some news that upset me (which I’m going to be selfish about and not talk about it here). Lets just say it was work related and basically something that I had been working on really really hard didn’t work out the way I had hoped. At that point I was so exhausted that I nearly cried... instead I got angry and went and had lunch with a colleague and complained about stupid things... this helped a lot! She also made some great suggestions about how to approach the problem and so I had something to focus on instead of the bad news. I was still bummed, but at least I felt like I had a little control over the situation.

After working for a bit I headed to the break room to get some water, but there was no water on the water-cooler thing. I asked the secretary if it was broken and she came in to check on it and then loaded it up. The problem was that she loaded it up with a water jug thing that was broken and no water came out when I pressed the button. So we took the jug off (no big deal) and I put on a new one (big deal). The broken water jug had leaked water into the water cooler reservoir and when I loaded the new one all that water splashed out onto my shirt. I was soaked. I was exhausted. And I still had work to do before I could go home.

So I spent the rest of my day pouty and wet at my desk working on fixing the things that had gone wrong. I went home promptly at 5:00 and spent the night doing what any reasonable 20-something year old would do if they had a bad day: I watched Melissa and Joey on DVR cuddled up with my pup on the couch with a glass of wine and some cookie dough/ cookies.



I hope your day was better than mine!

PS. Did you vote on which paint color we should choose?

Painting

Now that we are done with the floors we get to move to decorating! Yay! First step painting!

I love painting. Painting is such a cheap way to brighten up a room! We plan on painting every room in the house, because the previous owners have chosen some colors that we are just not fans of.

The dining room and kitchen walls are painted a pink [they kindly left the swatch in the cupboard so that we could use it more if we wanted to!].

The living room and master are painted a grayish sky blue. Which you cannot really see in the pictures unless you squint and look really hard at the fireplace wall and the trim [yes, they painted the trim blue.... groan.] Now, the blue would be nice, if they hadn't painted the trim the same color... but they did.


[Before]

I knew I wanted the trim white-white. So, we chose Valspar’s white satin paint for the trim.

The walls were another story. At first I wanted green, then beige, then green, then gold... so we bought some paint samples and painted splotches on the wall.


[Paint 1, Paint 2, Paint 3, Paint 4]

Question: Which is your favorite?

Landscaping

Good Morning! My Monday was very long, so I'm glad that it is finally over!

Last night we tried to get some things done around the house since we didn't do any work on the house over the weekend. Mostly we just cleaned up, but we also talked about what exactly we wanted to do to the house. We are trying to figure out just what to do with the back yard (which I cannot wait to enjoy now that the weather is so nice!).

The shrubs around Our Old Colonial were left to grow for 2 years before we moved in... or so we thought... after talking to a couple of neighbors it sounds like it was left to grow for slightly longer, perhaps even the entire time the previous owners resided in the house. So we have a lot of time to make up for.


[This photo is from our first visit to the house, by the time we bought the house the entire area had grown 4 feet!]

There is a lot of work that needs to be done to get the house looking good again. We are going to pressure wash the outside and then decide whether or not we need to paint the exterior. The shutters definitely need to be painted and of course the roof needs to be replaced. And then there is the lawn...

The backyard was the worst in terms of being overgrown, Matt had to be very patient with the lawnmower the first time he mowed. Fortunately, the front lawn was kept up much better and just needed a quick trim.

We also need to trim back a lot of the bushes. There are two butterfly bushes that are overgrown in front of the house and blocking our view when we come out of the driveway. In the back there is ivy growing up our beautiful pine trees and over the fence into our neighbor’s yard [sorry Bob!]. The ivy is so bad it has even knocked over a section of the fence, it is currently being propped up with a fallen branch so that Brady cannot escape.


[We are tearing down that lattice-it is awful!]

Another item that needs to be taken care of is the mosquito breeding pond in the backyard. The pond is all hooked up with a pump and has some water plants in it, but it doesn’t have any water and it isn’t running. So we need to decide whether we are keeping it or tossing it [or selling it]. Right now I’m leaning toward getting rid of it, I don’t think that I would really be able to maintain it and it isn’t really big enough to be a focal point. But, I’m still debating.

Busy Weekend

Happy Monday! Back to work, back to work we go! I hope that everybody had a great weekend. For us, it went by much to quickly. We have had 3 day weekends for the past two weeks and this 2 day weekend just didn't feel long enough, but we still had a wonderful time!

Friday night, after polling facebook, we went out on date (Because obviously if your "friends" on facebook say you should go out on a date, you need to go out on a date!)



It was great! The last time Matt and I went on a date was back in March, can you believe it?

I guess I should add that eating out at a fast food place because you [are too lazy] don't have time cook dinner does not qualify as a date for me. So, while we have eaten out a few times since March, none of these dinners have been dates [in my opinion]. We had a wonderful time [which was good because the food was not that great]. We sat outside and spent 4 hours catching up and talking about this and that. It was just perfect!

Saturday we headed down to Dover for some flea market shopping with my cousin Stefanie. Stefanie has been talking about taking us Spence's Flea Market since we moved and we finally got to go. It was really neat. There were several vendors with some really neat antiques, like old Christmas Cards and antique cameras and some others with real junk: old DVDs and very well used shoes (gross!).

We were more interested in the furniture and found some brass lamps that we wanted. The owner offered $35 (for the pair), which was a great deal (IMO), but for whatever reason I felt the need to haggle the price and I offered $20. He was not negotiating in the mood to negotiate and I was not in the mood to cave, so I walked away.

In the end I'm glad we didn't get the lamps because we headed over to Canterbury Used Furniture. Canterbury Used Furniture is an old house filled with gorgeous antiques and a few knickknacks here and there. We picked up an old brass floor lamp for only $10. It will be going in the living room and will work perfectly as a reading light. [picture to follow!].

We ended up getting home rather late and shopping took it out of us, so after unpacking the car we watched The Five Year Engagement, while a storm passed through. If you're looking for a goofy movie I highly recommend The Five Year Engagement, it was lighthearted and cute.

Sunday I set my alarm for 6:15 so I could get up and enjoy the cool weather that the storm brought with it and headed out for a run. It was the first cool run that I've been on since the Spring and my goodness did it feel great and made me feel ready for anything! (don't you love that feeling?)

After running 100 errands, the weekend ended at my work's fall picnic. It was a great time with friends and their families [I am really lucky to work with such a great group of people and be able to call them friends]. I haven't met most of my colleague's spouses or kids, so it was nice to get to meet their families and watch the kids splash around in the pool. I had a great time being a bad influence to all the kids (by teaching them to stick our their tongue and telling them to go grab a cookie so they would be wired right before bed). The whole experience made me grateful that we live where we live and that we work with such great people. In the end, it got me hoping that we get to stay here for a long time, but only time will tell.

We ended up getting home late from the picnic and spent the evening trying getting ready for work, but ending up calling it quits and heading to bed.

Happy Monday!

DIY: Sanding and Poly

Armed with our new sander and brand spanking new shop vac we were ready to tackle the floors. We followed a tutorial from This Old House for the refinishing the floors.

Step 1: Pulling out the carpet
The first step was to pull out the carpet and remove all the furniture from the room [which meant we needed to lug the piano into a different room].


[No more carpet or furniture]

Step 2: Room Prep
Next we sealed off the rooms that weren’t getting sanded with large plastic sheets covering the doors so that we wouldn’t have to clean up afterwards.

Of course, because we had just bought the house and had not moved in yet, we didn't have any furniture. However, if you have furniture, you'll want to take it out of the room.

Step 3: Sanding
The fun part! Crank up the sander [Of course, make sure you have the right sander and pads first].

As we said in the last post we had to connect the sander to a shop vac to the sander because the sander’s bags had been recalled [fun stuff]. So we taped the shop vac hose to the sander to replace the bags.

First, switch on the shop vac and then start the sander. As you are sanding make sure you don’t stay in one place too long or you’ll fall though the floor you’ll have uneven floors. I had a good time dancing with the sander to move it around. **Shake your groove thing. Shake your grove thing Sander. YEAH YEAH!**



Every 5 minutes you will need to stop and vacuum off the buffer pads. This helps them keep doing their job well. However, if you’re doing a large area [as we were] you’ll want to flip them after some time and have multiple sets of pads. Otherwise, they will wear out and won’t be taking up any of the Poly.



After a couple hours of hard work, your floors will be ready to clean up for the next step: applying the poly.

Step 4: Clean Up
According to the This Old House tutorial, all you have to do to do before applying the poly was vacuum, sweep and sweep again. No wet mopping at all.

So, step 4 is: Vacuum the floor. Sweep the floor with a broom and the finish by sweeping with a microfiber cloth.

After cleaning up the floor we were ready to poly! We bought water based polyurethane and went to work....

Step 5: Applying the polyurethane
At first we tried using a roller, but we kept getting bubbles in the finish, so we switched to some expensive brushes. This made things go a lot slower, but certainly the finish would turn out better.

Once we were finished putting down the poly we turned around and looked at our work... smiled, drove back to the rental and crashed. [I think we started working 6:00am and finished around 11:00pm... so you can imagine we were exhausted!]


[New Shiny Floors!!]

DIY: Sanding or not?

So, we had committed to buffing our floor and went over to big box store #1 to pick our the sander.

Matt asked for a sander and some maroon pads for taking off the top layer of polyurethane. Since we were not pros at this [by any stretch of the imagination!] he made sure to tell the guy at the desk exactly what we were doing. We knew we needed maroon pads because that is what the This Old House website told us. However, they didn’t have maroon, they only had red and he told us this is what we needed.

We plopped it in the back of our car and headed home, ready to sand!!

We decided to start upstairs in one of the back guest rooms since we had heard horror stories about waves in the floor from inexperienced refinishers. If we were going to have waves, we wanted them in rooms we didn’t frequent.

I tried my best at running the sander and I just couldn’t get a hold of it. It kept going the wrong way and I didn’t quite get how to use it. Apparently, you move it left and right by moving the handles up and down. I was unaware of this and kept pushing down on the handles to try and get it to sit still! I think Matt took a lot of amusement in watching the lap around me in circles!

I handed the machine over to Matt and he took at try at it. He handled it with such grace, but it wasn’t doing anything. The sander was circling, but not pulling anything up! We had the wrong buffing pads....


[Maroon does not equal red]

The pads we had were for cleaning floors [like the ones the janitors used to clean the halls in elemetary school]. At the time we were slightly exhausted from pulling up staples and may have been ready to quit, but headed over to big box store #1 to pick up the right sander and pads.

After searching for ourselves we found the correct pads that only fitted a different sander [they did not have maroon pads for the one we had]. We didn’t have the old sander to return in exchange for the correct one, but since we didn’t want to make another trip, we rented the new sander and bought the new pads.

What is more fun was when we found out that the bag [where some of the dust from the floor goes into] for the new sander was recalled. So, we would have to buy a shop vac if we wanted to rent the sander. The person telling us this was hilarious. She said, “Let me leave while you make your decision so that you can say just how much you love big box store #1”. [Mind you this had been no quick exchange, we were probably in there for 2 hours figuring out what we needed and trying to talk to].

We said some “nice” things about the store and decided to rent the sander, buy the maroon pads, and the shop vac [we needed a shop vac anyway].



Now we were ready to sand!



Question: How many times do you think you go back and forth from home improvement stores when you do a reno?

DIY: Buffing Floors or Refinish Floors?

Matt and I knew as soon as we bought the house that we were going to refinish the floors, but after talking to some friends we decided to buff off the top layer of polyurethane instead. This saved us time and lots of energy.

Why buff?
Often times people simply refinish their floors [strip them down to the bare wood] to get them looking shiny and new. We were just going to jump on that bandwagon too, because we wanted shiny new floors. However, you can get shiny new floors [if you don’t have any major stains or scratches] by simply buffing off the top coat of polyurethane.



The majority of the reasons floors look dingy is exactly that-they are dingy and the polyurethane is no longer shining like it did when it was first applied.

Typically to refinish hardwood floors you use four different types of sandpaper: 60, 80, 100, and then finally 120 to get the floor to the smooth finish you want to apply polyurethane.

So rather than sanding the floor over and over again with different grade sandpaper you simply take off the stop coat with maroon buffer pads.

Not only does this save time and energy, but it also increased the longevity of your floor. You can only refinish hardwood floors so many times because you thin the boards each time you go down to the bare wood.

Happy Buffing!

DIY: Remove carpet from hardwood floors

I hope everybody had a wonderful Labor Day weekend! We had a great balance of relaxing and working around the house!

Prepping the floor:

There are still staples left in the floor after Matt and I spent countless hours removing the staples from the living room and then the stairs on the days after closing. So many that my hands were blistered and exhausted. Those staples that are left are just going to have to stay there for a while.


[So many staples!]

After several hours of practice we developed a method to attack the madness. We decided that the best tools for some of the staples were needle nose pliers and a mini crowbar assisted by a rubber mallet.


[Tap Tap]

To loosen the staples we tapped the mini crowbar under the staple and then pulled it [with all of our might]the rest of the way with the needle nose pliers.


[Get out of mah floor!]


After 2 full evenings and 1 afternoon of pulling out staples, the living room went from:


[Before]

To a living room looking like this:

[After]

So much better! I find it so hard to believe the somebody would cover these beautiful floors up!

Next step: stripping off the old poly.