My wife and I add home improvement projects to our Thanksgiving traditions. We take the long weekend to kick off medium to large projects. Close to ten years ago we started this tradition when we replaced all the nasty old carpeting in our upstairs bedrooms with hardwood. We completely underestimated how much effort stripping 1000 sq feet of carpeting and laying hardwoods would end up being.
It didn't help that after we started ripping up the carpet we decided we may as well replace the base molding. What was in place was basic bull nose molding and we wanted to upgrade to a nicer colonial molding. Then we thought that if we were replacing molding we may as well replace all the case molding around the doors. Then since we had light weight hollow core doors we were planning on replacing eventually anyway we may as well replace them with solid core 6 panel doors.
And you know what? If you've got all your floors torn up and no molding... You may as well paint too, right?
That long weekend project took three months to finish but it all looks great now. I may even finish the last of the base molding sometime this decade.
It was a good experience because it taught us to not be surprised when you look under the covers. One of our bedrooms had the carpet padding glued to the floor with a rubber cement. You know, just in case the tacks and gravity both failed. Be kind to the next person doing renovations... Don't glue down your carpet padding. We also found water damage that had been partially covered up and a poorly done patch in the sub floor that needed to be fixed. We also found around a half gallon of playground sand under the padding in one of the rooms. If these kinds of things would bug you, pay someone else to do your renovations, or do them yourself so you can know they're done right.
Since then we've done our living room with Kempas and I did our first floor powder room with some of the leftover red oak.
This year we're redoing our dining room. We've lived here for about sixteen years and the dining room has been the same awful pepto-bismol pink as it was when we bought it. The carpet wasn't too bad when we moved in but sixteen years of cats and people made it pretty gross.
We started demo a few weeks ago with the help of some friends of mine. We'll call them Will and Robin to help protect their identities. Will has started a vocational program for carpentry and I thought he might like some real life hands on experience. Robin is his older brother and is college. He's tagging along for fun.
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| Heimdall, Idris and Luther in their new playground |
