Well the kitchen is now totally gutted, just 2 copper pipes for the sink left (and even those are screwed up! The only thing right about this house were the windows.
The cabinets were in such bad shape that they joined the tub waiting for the day they ship out for the landfill (which happened today).
We wrestled for a great deal of time about what to do with the downstairs flooring. I was really pushing for bamboo flooring. Gave that up and said ok to Pergo. Now we finally decided to get the floors sanded and finished.
The floors are solid Yellow Pine and definitely rustic. They'll have that handscraped look, cause boy are they scraped! I think it will help give us that beach feel we're going for.
In order to have floors sanded they must be completely free of all debris (ie nails and staples) Normally this isn't a huge deal, go around and nail down the few loose nails sticking out. However since the inhabitants in this home had stock in Stanley tools and got some kind of kickback for using as many staples as possible to hold down their carpets this was a different story. I pulled up thousands of these buggers, and when I say pull I don't mean a gentle tug, I mean pull so hard the grips of your needlenose pliers rip off and then continue pulling until the skin of your hand looks like shredded wheat after soaking in a bowl of milk for 30 minutes. Pulling so hard that you pray to God each time that this staple will come out easier then the last 3,000 staples that did not. Desperately trying to develop some newfangled technique to make the staples come out easier (believe it or not after staple 3,567 I did find one that worked on every third staple). Groaning in frustration that after declaring a room "staple free" you find 3 more rows of the dang things, each with about 30 staples each. My hand still throbs with pain from those agonizing hours of staple pulling. This event has caused me to swear, SWEAR, that I will never put carpet in my home ever. I have too much sympathy for the poor schmuck that has to yank out an entire home of staples. See the demon that has plagued me these last few days!
After yanking all those horrible things I had to sand the upstairs floor. So I went to Lowes...
before I continue a little shout out to my Lowes pals! Hey Kitchen Beth, Plumbing John, and Appliance and overall tall dude Wayne! See ya tomorrow!
OK, back to the sanding. So I rent this sander, on my way there the Spouse calls me and tells me that the Haitian Sensation strongly recommends getting some help when moving the sander. Well, I never arranged for help and its 8 in the morning on a Wednesday. So I go to Lowes on my own, and rent the sander, and wheel it out of Lowes to my van. I then have to pick it up to put it into the van. Oh, my back still twitches in agony at the thought. Heres a helpful hint about sanding, get someone to help you lift the sander. It seriously was the heaviest thing I have lifted in recent memory. So heavy my back muscles felt like something was going to rip. But, I DID IT! HooWaa! I lifted it about 2.5 feet into my van, and broke a sweat. How the heck was I going to get that thing up to my second floor?
Well I did. I aged about 5 months doing it. Another hint, just take it a stair at a time, no funny stuff. When a motor and slab of steel weighing over 120-140 lbs is giving you a little trouble, don't try to shift your grasp, don't try to lean it on a step, or lean back and give it a rest on your gut. It's just too heavy. My heart still hasn't gotten its regular rhythm back. But at least my "I'm Still a Man" credentials are in good standing order. For you ladies, its doing something idiotic, or something requiring gross brute strength, ideally both at the same time.
Moving on, long post. We sanded the floors, and they look, well, sanded.
Oh, before I sanded I found another few thousand staples that had to come out.
Asexual Crystalline Reproduction in Zinc Coated (Hot Dip) Iron Fasteners
is the title of the paper I'm working on right now. Its really focusing on the possibility of complex crystal growth in iron deposits as a viable method of increasing the total number of fasteners in a given substrate. Still have to work around the way they separate and refasten themselves into the substrate (Yellow Pine, Pinus ponderosa) I'm sure we'll find some deus ex machina to surmount that obstacle. Grant monies should be pouring in any day now.Ok so sanding finished. We should be washing the walls by the weekend. Yeah!
Father in Law came, and we finally took everything to the dump. We fit all of it in one trailer. We seriously looked like some Nepalese carpet merchants on their way to Kathmandu to sell their wares.
We then had to dump the stuff. But not in large oversized dumpsters like I had done in the past. Oh no. This time we drove all the way to the top of the landfill. Now if you are not familiar with the practice, we take our trash and dump it in one spot. This makes a small mound. They cover the mound with plastic tarps and then dirt. They then put more trash on this mound and repeat with the tarps and the dirt, over and over and the hill gets bigger and bigger. It takes on the appearance of a Mesopotamian ziggurat. We made it to the top. And it was exactly what its called, a trash dump, dirt and garbage everywhere. With huge bulldozers, as big as a home pushing the garbage around. Kind of the way I tidy up the house, I don't really pick up the mess I just push it around so the mess is in a couple different spots and therefore less messy. The Spouse disagrees.
So we start dumping our crap, and then a huge garbage truck pulls up along side us and shows us how its done. Well if our trailer had some hydraulics and a giant trash mushing whatever that thing is that mushes trash, then we could be like it too, but man did it stink. And you thought they smelt bad on the outside!
Well after nearly getting crushed by the bulldozer we finished our job and went home.
We dump 1,400 lbs of trash that day. cool. Trash that at one time was brand new, brand spanking new and cost lots of money. The people couldn't wait to get it home and try it out, put it together, make their lives better. And there I was cursing it as it fell into a heap of stinking garbage, and splashing me with its stink. Moments later a massive plow of yellow steel would shove its mouldering mass deep into the muck and bury it under more trash were it will remain for all eternity, till the end of the world. And so there goes our endless quest for more stuff, in the end it all ends up in the dump, either by your hand or some others. Spend your money on the things that matter. Like more stuff to replace the crap you just threw out!
Tomorrow we wash the upstairs, I sand the downstairs some more and maybe some doors get sanded on the porch so all the neighbors can witness the physical transformation as I morph into Bob Vila, or that bearded dude who sands everything by hand in that Old Yankee Workshop thing. That would be way cooler than the Vila!
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