As you noted in the previous blog post, there was carpet throughout the house. We pulled that all up (thankfully with help from my father). Carpet is heavy...and grossly dirty, but pulling it up was not the hard part. It was the hundreds, dare I say thousands of staples that we had to pick up. And we did not have one of those nifty tools that carpet guys have. I was on my hands and knees for hours with a hammer and chisel chipping away at those things. Let me just say, those carpet installers did not want their carpet to budge! The floors have been a long and tedious process because we wanted to salvage the existing red oak and make it look like 64 years of wear and tear hadn't taken its toll. Below are some pictures of the process. I'll show you the final results when we finally achieve them :)
Along the border of the wood floor and rows down the middle, you cvan see all the staples with the carpet pad still stuck underneath them.
We tried to set up a play area for Elias one night so we could get an hour or so of work done. Did it work? Nope! He just wanted to roam about the house and find the hammer and drill!
We put in a lot of midweek late nights in
Here is a look at some of Aaron's skill. There were areas in the dining room that had deep, dark stains. He pulled up those boards and replaced them with new red oak boards.
Now we come to the point in our tour where you shold probably put your safety glasses and gloves on...
This is a view looking down the hall again. The back room you can see is Elias' room (drywall torn down from hall and the closet in Eli's room).
We moved the crawl access space to another room
Recognize this? This is the living room area. Aaron spent the evening tearing down all of the drywall on the wall shared with the 3rd bedroom. This was where I just trusted his designer eye :)
Oh and I almost forgot. We sent samples of our ceilings from various rooms in the house to a lab to have them tested for asbestos. Thankfully those tests were negative and we were able to scrape down blithe on our ceilings affectionally known as popcorn.
And we took down the particle board facade that was on the fireplace wall. We plan on creating a toally different look here!
The following show the pictures of the water damage on the south side of the house and the invasive termite damage in the bathroom on the outside wall and around the bathtub.
This is an actual stud, you know the wood member that helps hold the walls of the house up. We were able to grab this and pull it out with our hands. It crumbled. If you look closely, you can actually see light through the wood!
Our little helper :)
I think Bandit is a little concerned at this point!
In the previous post I had mentioned that there was a part of the exterior stucco wall that was compromised. This is a fesh new lathe that is now water proof. No more water getting through the holes left by some old carport.
