232 Green Street

It's Beginning To Look Like A House!

Well, after a weekend of hard work, I can say with all honesty that our first floor is done! With the exception of hanging a few pictures, we're just about where we wanted to be. Shelves are all hung, walls are painted, and we even had time to string up some lights in the front part of the floor. It feels really good to see one part of our vision of the house coming together.

We also spent a good part of the time working on our soon-to-be bedroom on the second floor. This was one of those projects that went from simple to ugly fairly quickly. To give you an idea of the history, the room originally looked like this:

Originally we were just going to re-paint the room, but then we discovered that a) the walls were all some kind of hardened masonite board, and b) the wiring was all sorts of crazy. In the end, we decided to tear out the plaster and start from scratch. For anyone who attempts this route, my two words of advice would be to 1) use a good mask, or else your lungs will punish you; and 2) realize that the demolition is probably the worst part of the process. We may well hire that part out in the future, if only to avoid carrying bags of debris up and down flights of stairs. Although, it is a lot of fun to carry out sanctioned destruction via a sawzall!

Several weeks, three garbage cans worth of plaster debris (and let me tell you, that stuff is HEAVY), one roll of Romex 12/2 wiring, and 12 sheets of drywall later, we are now taping and sanding the room in preparation for painting it. Once that's done, all that will be left is putting in a laminate wood floor, and we will have completed our first full out renovation!

Oh, and if anyone out there has some tips for putting in laminate floors, feel free to leave them here on the blog, as we've never tackled that before. Come to think of it, we've never really tackled any of this before!