Matt Pulls Up Kitchen Floor and I Help Only a Little

First Matt went around and pulled up the edge strips. This is also a look at "before":

This is a good video showing how I helped:

Here I am concerned about being hit in the face. I am slightly more valuable on this job than the videos testify, but, you know, exactly slightly:

"This is my job" - I'm telling you I held that wedge in there SO helpfully:

Lots of layers to deal with - here you can see we have only pulled up the first layer of parquet flooring. There are still more layers (linoleum and vinyl) to pull up after that:

I'm just giving you the play-by-play here!

He found the seam!

And with that we pulled the mower inside again to call it quits for the day.

A few days later, he went to work on the rest of the floor and this is what he found underneath - oak!
However, it is likely too damaged to refinish, we will see about replacing some of the wood, or just covering it all with new flooring:

Wow I am a Terrible Poster

I haven't posted since before Family Camp!

Matt and I and Kara stayed at Family Camp in early July, and while Kara volunteered at camp all week, Matt and I skipped all of the daytime workshops and activities to work out at Greenwood -- coming back for some awesome services in the evenings.

Matt continued to work on the basement wiring with his friend Ron who has donated hours of help and expertise to us! He also removed a huge stump in the front yard, got the basement cleaned up and tore up the kitchen floor with some helpers from the Jackson Free Methodist church who are trying to raise money for a mission's trip!

My job during the week was washing out the master closet, which I thought would take me one day. Instead, it took the whole week and it's still not done. I realized after the first scrub-down, that I was actually washing paper that had been painted. So Matt and I pulled down all of the shelves inside the closet and I went to work stripping the paper from the walls. The walls will have to be patched because the paper was covering up some significant cracks, but once the floors are leveled we can begin working on cracked walls.

Before:

Paper is stripped now (sort of looks worse)

When I realized that I was washing paper!

What I used to strip it:

Dirt and grime:

The opposite wall I could just wash because it was NOT paper:

That's it for this post - next post will be just pix of Matt pulling up the kitchen floor (more interesting than this one ha).

Thursday June 29th in the Basement

The basement is apparently where all the wiring in the house goes to die. There were so many wires hanging from the rafters, intertwined with so SO many cobwebs, it was hard to determine what was what. As the years went by, and new wiring was introduced, the previous owners never removed old wiring, they just disconnected the old and left it there alongside the new.

The below is a terrible photo, but it gives you an idea of the cobweb situation.

Matt and his friend Ron worked from 9 until 3pm, solving wiring mysteries. They would just choose a wire and follow it to its source. More than not, there was no source, just a cut wire, or a dead end of some sort. These they pulled and put into a huge pile on the floor. Kara worked alongside them all morning with the wet/dry vac, just sucking up cobwebs! They succeeded in connecting all of the basement lights, and disconnecting everything above that. Slowly they'll work toward re-connecting the well, replacing the main, and then get everything else back on line.

At some point these big oil drums will need to be cut out and removed from the basement - that's going to be a tough job, but will open up a neat little alcove.

It was a hot day, but the guys kept cool down there! I kept busy preparing for yet another rehearsal, as well as washing another wall (this time with a product new to me called Dirtex, that's supposed to be better for walls than PineSol, as it leaves no residue and is pretty hard on dirt), running to get people food and watching Kara remove some more flooring, which will get its own post.

Another thing that will happen in the basement, is a new pole. Right now the posts holding up the floor above in some areas are actual tree trunks! But the floor is sagging in the kitchen above, so what Matt will do is dig a hole, fill it with cement, and then place this metal pole atop it, and secure it to the beam above. The pole has a handle on the side, and every week or so, Matt will give the handle (or crank?) a full turn, raising the pole a bit. He plans to raise the floor above about 3 inches. This affects our timeline for painting, and for window installation, because everything is going to be affected by the floor being raised. We will have to give the walls time to settle, and then we can patch cracks in the walls and install windows. 

Sunday June 25

We've been heading down to Greenwood about once a week, sometimes twice - always on Matt's day off (Sunday or Thursday), and it's always fun to watch Matt doing what he really wants to be doing on his day off...working.

We had just a few hours last Sunday evening to work, and Matt's friend Brian came to help. They decided to repair the worst corner of the foundation (the decorative stone) that was crumbling. It was fun to hear how they went about doing this, which is something neither had attempted before.

They looked over the wall, headed to Home Depot for supplies and came back with cement and a trowel and a big mixing pan. Then they just made it up as they went along!

It turned out great, and they both had a lot of fun even though they were completely muddy and bloody after it was over. Apparently they had to dig out any loose stone, then fill the cavity with cement and stones and replace the biggest stones in some decorative fashion. There was a lot of chiseling and pounding with hammers, laughter and sweat. Good times were had by all.

Before:

During:

 

After:

I was playing a service at Westwind's while they worked, and Kara was pulling up the flooring in the small room off of the master bedroom that will eventually become a big bathroom.

It was a great day!