The House Renovations that Never End

Every summer (and most Christmas breaks) I spend a large chunk of my break transforming various parts of our house.  I enjoy the work because it is opposite what I do most days. I usually sit or stand around and talk and think and write - physically inactive work.  But working on the house is physical labor that I find rewarding (though I would not want to make my livelihood at it).

I'm aided in my enjoyment by a wife who always has ideas for improving our house.  So over the five years we have lived in this house, we have now changed every room in some fashion, some quite dramatically and others only marginally so.  Throughout it all, we've always had the ultimate goal of removing our carpet and exposing the hardwood we knew was underneath.  We were simply waiting until the boys were old enough that hard wood would not meet soft heads on a regular basis.

So this summer, I slowly started taking up carpet, one room at a time.  Our bedroom was not bad - it was small, could be closed off for the kids, and we could sleep downstairs on the pull-out couch.  However, once the carpet was up I discovered that the floors needed a bit of work.  Evidently, two layers of carpet had been put down and when installing the second layer, the workers left the staples from the original carpet pad in the floor and then gouged the floors in sections putting in goodness knows what.  I had to pull two layers of staples out, fill in the holes and the gouges, sand down the floors, clean them, and then apply a few new layers of polyurethane.  A bit of work, but not bad because we could keep the boys out of the room.

Not so with the hall, living room, and dining room.

I tackled each individually, and Joy gamely took the boys on excursions.  We ate at odd times and in odd places (especially when the piano was sitting in the middle of our kitchen), had mountains of furniture to try and keep the boys off, and had dust and dirt from the carpets everywhere.  That was our impression of it.  The boys?  They just loved having all that exposed, hard floor that was better than a bowling alley or a roller rink.

We have a bit more to do painting-wise, but the floors are finally finished and we've been enjoying them (and the boys still ride all their machines on them constantly).  Noah had discovered they make a great loud sound when you throw things on them and the boys have had to stop tackling each other on the stairs (which is a happy consequence of this change), but overall we've settled into new floors quite well.