The hardwoods guys dropped off the wood on Thursday and then spent the day removing carpet and demoing the subfloor. Underneath the carpet, throughout the entire house, was an additional 3/4-inch layer of particle board. They were able to remove it from all the bedrooms the first day but you can still see it here in the fireplace room.
The bedrooms were clear, though.
We still had one unpainted bedroom room. I didn't notice until the photograph that the paint under the window is different. What were you doing, Harriet?
Everything was feeling kind of grim.
They hadn't gotten around to the kitchen floor on the first day, which gave us the opportunity to see all the layers of grossness here. The kitchen and laundry room had 2 layers of linoleum over 3/4" plywood, which nobody was very excited about removing. Fortunately I do not have to do it. One thing I've learned so far in this renovation is that there are people willing to do things that seem impossibly tedious and exhausting if you pay them enough money. And sometimes it's even less money than you'd expect.
We spent Thursday night scraping the rest of the wallpaper off the kitchen. It wasn't great but ended up coming off relatively easy, especially in retrospect.
On Friday we had tickets to a comedy show, so we took the night off from manual labor. Then when we arrived on Saturday, our contractor was there removing the brass fireplace fixture and the pipe into the floor! We're going to have to paint this now, obviously, but it looks a whole lot better already.
The flooring guys also took out the railing by the front door. Things were looking up!
The kitchen was close to intolerable to me at this point. They'd gotten the linoleum up, which was a plus, but that subfloor is filthy and the walls were nothing but primer and it was STRESSING ME OUT.
To make myself feel better, I took all the tape off of the sunroom and the fireplace room. We still have to paint the inside of the closet, but it's going to be white so no need for taping. This is a nice contrast between the new paint and the old.
Ben spent most of Saturday morning spackling the kitchen walls and removing all the last tiny bits of wallpaper - and then, finally, we got to paint.
I can't believe how much it suddenly looks like a regular room, even with no floors and the insane green cabinets intact.
Unfortunately, we had one wallpaper room left, what will be the guest bathroom. We thought it wouldn't be so bad since it's been on those walls through years of steamy showers - but they must have used some kind of extra heavy duty glue. We spent the entire day on Sunday working on these walls, and it's still not done and they are a huge mess, with lots of rips and holes in the sheet rock. Ben is going to have some major spackling ahead of him.
It's extremely demoralizing to spend what feels like ages peeling wallpaper and then step back and see you've done about two square feet. But we kept plugging along and are hoping we'll be able to knock the rest of it out in an evening.
We did also paint the last bedroom, which looks nice. We (Ben) recently painted our current guest room this color and we like it and wanted to keep all the bedding and window treatments, so we're copying the scheme in this new house.
Sunday we also started painting the cabinets. LOOK AT IT.
If you squint you don't really notice that only the middles are painted. They have two coats already and will need more. We're going to take all the doors off, I guess, and really do it right, although I admit I'm putting up kind of a whiny fight about this.
This kitchen is giving me hope that we are actually going to get this whole place fixed up. I feel like already we could sell it for more than we paid, just having things about 75% painted and the hardwood sitting in the house.
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