Front Rooms – Part One

We didn’t get a whole lot done this last weekend, but let’s talk about our plans for the front rooms.

The front of the house is made up of two rooms: the carpeted living room and vinyl tiled dining room, with a wide doorway between them. We were excited to take out the old carpet and see how it improved the air quality in the house.

The original hardwood floor was discovered in the bedrooms during the inspection, and we had a hunch it would be present throughout the house. We thought that repairing and refinishing them would just be too much to undertake along with everything else. It will be more efficient to put a new, non-destructive floor treatment over the top of them.

We were not expecting the floor lasagna in the dining room where the hardwood was covered in two layers of glue-down sheet linoleum, which was covered with plywood subfloor for the vinyl tiles. We’re not super looking forward to dealing with that, but we get to put it off for a while and focus on the walls.

Jesse was at this point wondering how many times he would have to relocate the stack of flooring. Probably at least once more! This was before an afternoon spent patching and priming the living room.

The house had been occupied by the previous tenant for about 10 years, and the walls had accumulated quite a lot of nails, screws, and small holes in that time. Our dedication to doing things right the first time does daily battle with our impatience to see progress!

These rooms definitely needed some fresh texture application after all of our patchings. In terms of dry times, everything seems to take so much longer than advertised. The caulk around the subfloor in the laundry room promised to be ready to paint in 30 minutes but ended up postponing our flooring install by a week. We were eager to paint the ceiling in the dining room but the texture stayed tacky for the rest of the day, which again meant it was delayed until the next weekend. Also, rattle-can texture application is just the worst.

You may have noticed that Jesse is wearing glasses in these pictures! Despite an abundance of caution and religious use of PPE, something managed to get under his contacts and cause a mild infection. He reported multiple consecutive nights of his eye itching furiously after contact removal, and Jen ordered him to keep them out until he could see a doctor. She threatened him with the possibility of eye amoebas to make sure he would take it seriously (it wasn’t eye amoebas).

Jesse blames the sawdust from the table saw, but he spent a lot of time handling the carpet and the dirt that we found beneath it seems like it would have been microbe heaven.