RENO WEEK 1

WARNING: LONG POST AHEAD! :)

Well we are officially into week one of our reno and what a week it has been! Here is a little timeline of what we did this past week:

MONDAY: We began the tear out and demo of flooring in our kitchen, bathroom and entry way. We removed the trim and baseboards and found that the linoleum was not adhered down but simply held in place by the quarter round trim. No wonder it was peeling up in a few places! So that was easy and we contemplated leaving this beauty down, but decided against it :)

Hello Beautiful!

TUESDAY: We were measured by a pro, Floyd. He laser measured our entire first floor, showed me some pictures on his phone of a tree falling on his cars in the snowstorm we had before Christmas and was overall pretty entertaining and very helpful. Floyd let us know we had a 1/4" layer of plywood under our linoleum that would need to come up to level the floors, that left me a little freaked out. If that stuff was glued down we would have some serious work to do! That night while I went to yoga, Murph dove into getting the subfloor up and thankfully a crowbar did the trick. The 1/4" plywood came up fairly smoothly leaving behind 100's of staples needing to be hammered back into the sub floor. This is where the work got dirty and we were ill prepared. While we had cleared a few things out we had no idea how messy this would be. When all was said and done our entire 1st floor was COVERED in dust. Old, smelly, dust. That's right, the couches, everything on our counters, us, Willy ... EVERYTHING. Lesson learned, empty out the rooms or do better prep work. Oh well, thank goodness our Dyson had it covered!

WEDNESDAY: Murph got right to work when he got home and continued the subfloor demo. We found that we would have to figure out a way to clean up the flooring at the base of the cabinets since the subfloor runs under them. We called it an early night and met up with the Holtgrewe's and Keraus' for some BBQ and discussion of Lance Armstrong.

THURSDAY: I had dinner with some high school girlfriends and my fearless husband kept trucking on the flooring and got everything pulled up. He also got the sink in the bathroom out and the top of the vanity. I did manage to begin chiseling on the subflooring next to the cabinets, this was going to be a tedious process I could see already. I also made an appointment to get a plumber in to look at installing a pedestal sink in our bathroom. Along with the chisels I brought home a Bagster dumpster, since we had no idea what to do with the mess accumulating in our house!

The Bagster in action!

FRIDAY: I met with the plumber and talked about moving our water lines to accommodate a pedestal sink. Murph also had heard on Pandora Home Depot was offering whole home instillation on laminate and engineered hardwood for only $397 so we made a trip there and back to Lumber Liquidators to make sure we were getting the best deal possible and to investigate upgrading the flooring to an engineered hardwood. We were almost sold on an engineered hardwood until the guy at both places poo pooed that idea. They said having a large dog and eventually kids would destroy the floors and we would be unhappy. Since we are doing the entire first floor and not just the kitchen they both STRONGLY advised us to stick with the laminate. We took our samples home and decided that Nebraska Furniture Mart still was giving us the best deal. I also spoke with NFM on the phone and tried to negotiate our price. We had run into a little issue where they told us the price on the floor when we put the deposit down was not correct and they would have to charge us more. On Friday I got them to meet us 1/2 way and our price was now $1.79 / sq. ft vs. the advertised $1.59. That night we continued to chip away at the subfloor near the cabinets and vacuumed and vacuumed the subfloor some more.

Subfloor is out, cabinets are ready for a facelift!

Our general contractor "hard at work"

SATURDAY: With all of our subflooring out we could now tackle the cabinets. Like I mentioned before they are getting painted and would need some prepping. We finally emptied out the cupboards, keeping only a few necessities out. We took off all of the doors and hinges and removed the drawers labeling them all so we knew where they would go back after painting. At this point I had a haircut and left Murph to sand away on all of the bases and uppers. When I got back Murph had 1 round of sanding done and I attacked round 2. Sanding created another mess, people who do this without emptying their cabinets are bat-shit-crazy, it was filthy and we washed the cabinets down no less than 4 times throughout the day. We also filled any dings and cracks with wood putty and applied a couple coats of deglosser to insure we had the shiny finish completely removed. The deglosser directions told us to get our coat of primer up within the hour so we wrapped up the day by applying a coat of primer to the cabinet bases. At this point we were pooped and called it a night.

Primed!

SUNDAY: We got up and went to 7:45 church so we could keep at the cabinets. But first it was time to get our Bagster set up and get some junk out of the house, the dust/dirt smell was so gross! We hauled out all of the subflooring, trim and baseboards. We set to work on the living room and completely emptied it, including all of that antique glass we just put away in there haha. Up came the carpet and the padding, more staple removing and a good scubdown of the painted subfloor since the previous owners pet's let behind some undesirable stains (ICK!). Since the "dirty work" was done I vacuummed all of the furniture down and we took a nap. After some video chatting with my family and a tour of the demo Murph headed out for a volleyball game and I set to getting the first coat of paint up on the cabinets. While Murph was out the Holtgrewe's made a very sweet cupcake delivery and I was so pumped to see 4 Sprinkles red velvet cupcakes hand crafted by them ;) When Murph got home I was about 1/2 done with the first coat so he took to removing our old bathroom vanity and began pulling our doors and door frames out since we decided now is the time to replace them with some better doors. I also fielded another call from NFM regarding the flooring and succeeded in getting them down to the posted price of $1.59 / sq. ft. on the flooring! It was a little work, and a lot of calm negotiation (not my strong suit) but we got the posted price and are happy with our bid of about $3,000 for all of the flooring, sound padding and instillation of about 727 sq. feet of beautiful handscraped laminate!

Coat 1 of "Cow's Milk" is up!

MONDAY: I got the bid for the plumber's work and about fell out of my chair with the near $1K pricetag. I began thinking of new and creative ways to accommodate a new sink in this little powder room. Here are some initial ideas of how we might be able to do a sink without moving our water lines or caring they are exposed: 

Love the towel rack, wire baskets and vintage table look

Thinking of a creamy white vessel sink and just a little counter space

We actually ended up taking Monday night off. We needed a night to relax and become re-engaged with our DVR haha. So after a week that's where the reno is, back to painting tonight and getting the carpet up and out of our family room! Stay tuned!