Tag: home improvement

all about me, home improvement

updates are interesting… aren’t they?

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It seems like everything and nothing happens these days in my life. There is waking up, driving to work, work, driving home from work, watching TV/passing time until bedtime, sleep, and then repeat. However, these past few weeks, we have been dealing with the house being in total upheaval over the floors in the office being replaced, and I have nearly broken my back to get things back in order.

First was installing the hardwood floors. This is something that is, in theory, easy to do. Easy to follow instructions, and relatively inexpensive if you do it yourself ($700 for a 12×10 room). Yet, the manual labor… whoa. It is on a level of it’s own. It isn’t enough that you have to hammer and things like that, but you have to be bent over unnaturally to do so. That just KILLS a back; and given my history with major back trauma, it has done me in.

To top all of that off, we decided, “hey, now is a good time to paint the office, since nothing is in there, right?”. So we painted two walls a chocolate brown, and the two other walls a baby blue-ish color. The result is an amazing looking room, if I do say so myself. I am in love with the results, but I hated the process.

As if that wasn’t enough, I also decided that it was the perfect time to build a new bookcase/shelving unit for our electronic components and video games. That was a chore too. But, like everything else, it is finished!! I am going to try and get some pictures up in the next little while, so check flickr for those. Aren’t home projects so much fun? Yeah… when they are DONE.

home improvement

installing hardwoods in the office

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putting in hardwood floors in the officeWell, as I mentioned earlier, we had the floors torn out of our office, and had the joists completely rebuilt, with a new subfloor to boot. James and I talked about getting carpet in there, since we didn’t think we could afford hardwood floors; especially after the $3500 it cost to have the floors fixed. Well, after I met with the carpet installers, James felt that we could install the hardwoods ourself, and save a bundle of money. Initially, I was VERY skeptical, but after we talked about it, I agreed to give it a go.

So, earlier last week, we started installing the hardwoods in the office. We bought these really beautiful pre-finished oak hardwoods, which ran us about $700 total for all of the wood. It is a “lock and tap” system, where you lock it in place, and then use this wicked looking nailer to permanently hold the wood in place. James started out doing it by himself, but I agreed to help out yesterday.

We started about 2 o’clock, and worked right up until 9:30. We finished just in time to return that wicked nailer back to Home Depot, and by the end of the day, we were exhausted. I don’t know how people do that for a living; intensive labor doesn’t even begin to cover what we did. Today, my back is incredibly sore, as are my legs and my arms. We worked our asses off, but the end result, is a beautiful new hardwood floor in our office for a fraction of the price we would have payed someone else to do it. I am glad that it is over, but like MUCH of our other home improvement projects, I really don’t think that I would do it again. Now, I have to paint the office, and James is going to install the baseboards and quarter round, and we will have our office looking better than ever! AND, it will have a STABLE floor for once.

Seriously, though, I took some pictures of the joists that were “holding up” the floor when they pulled the subfloor off, and I cannot believe that we didn’t fall through before now. It was insane. I am so glad we did it, and I am so glad that the hard parts are over. Now, to do the little parts, clean up, and REST. I am wiped out! It is time to take off my weekend warrior hat, and get some rest; my back deserves it! I’ll get some pictures of the office once it is painted and everything truly is done… until then, the above picture gives you an idea of what we had to do!