Naughty Pine...

Ok so the next thing up was the floors in the main part of the house... It kind of happened in stages, yet now looking back it felt like it all happened at the same time.

This is what the dining room, living room, and hallway looked like prior to fixing 'em up:


Josh went to the local salvage shop, ReNew, and looked around for some re-claimed flooring. He found some beautiful knotty pine, and enough to do all three parts of the house so that it would seem seamless.

We started with the dining room and Josh opened up the doorway from the kitchen more which made the house seem so much bigger. Of course, because of the paneling in the dining room, we had to put in new drywall in most of the room. We got the floors in up to the living room first and then dry-walled and trimmed and painted. Ha ha, the paint was atrocious at first, an "institution" green. Made us feel like we were in prison, so we repainted with a greyer version of the green which was so much better.


Next we moved on to the living room and hallway. First we scraped and scraped and scraped wall paper. That sucked soooo bad. Really, the problem here was that the walls are not dry wall. They are something that the house inspector had referred to as "beaver board," it looks like a really cheap version of homasote. Half the time when peeling the paper off, it would rip off layers of this material with it. So, we resolved to skim coat the walls with plaster prior to painting. That seemed to work ok, although it was a very long and tedious process, and let's face it, neither Josh nor I are known for our patience. Eventually, though, it was finished.


After that we took a very long break.