Thursday, August 14, 2008

The Saga Continues....

So we returned from vacation (which was a fun time visiting friends & family) to the mess that is our home. A few days after we returned our new door finally arrived. A good friend of DH's from work very kindly came and stayed until after midnight that night helping us to remove the old door, fix the HUGE hole in the floor, and put the new door in. It was a lot of hard work, took much longer than we expected it to, but finally we have solid flooring (albeit just subflooring at the moment) to walk on and a door to get in and out of the back yard with. Unfortunately, we discovered that the reason there was so much damage to the floor in the first place has to do with the deck on the back of our house. The previous owners originally put on a wood deck, decided they didn't like it, then put a vinyl deck directly OVER the top of the wood deck, which raised the level of the decking material (which is flush up against the house and door threshold) ABOVE the level of the threshold. This means that every time it rained, water would drain into the house under the vinyl flooring, thus rotting the subfloor material.....which meant that any new material we put down would also be ruined unless the problem with the deck was fixed (i.e. removing the vinyl deck). Due to current time constraints, DH cut the ends of the vinyl decking boards back far enough away from the door threshold to allow water to drain AWAY from the house which should take care of the problem until we can figure out what to do about the deck at a later date (hey, I still don't have a dining room floor yet....the deck can wait now that the water issue is solved!).
So this brings us to the next stage of the project.......the kitchen! The kitchen had the same peeling vinyl as the dining room, which meant that flooring needed to be replaced.......so we picked out new vinyl flooring to be put down in the kitchen (DH & I didn't want hardwoods in the kitchen mainly due to the risk of water damage to the wood possible in a kitchen environment). Because the scope of the project kept increasing as our time kept decreasing, we bit the financial bullet and paid for the vinyl to be installed by a professional. So two nights before it's to be installed, DH & I remove all of the appliances from the kitchen (we put them in the dining room.....since the dining room table is in the family room and the chairs are in the playroom, there was room for the appliances!) so that DH could tear out the old vinyl and underlayment (had to save some money somewhere!). Then we decided that while all of the appliances were out and there was no flooring down......didn't that make it a good time to repaint the kitchen??? Which means that the night before the new vinyl was put in DH & I were up until almost 3am painting the kitchen! I bet you think that we were then done with the kitchen, don't you??? Nope! Two days after the new vinyl was put down we got all of the appliances back where they belonged......then DH decided that was the perfect time to hang a "new" (OK, it's about 40 years old and came from the the kitchen of the house I grew up in so it's not "new") light in the kitchen, which required him to cut a hole in the ceiling of the kitchen, a hole in the ceiling of the pantry, a hole in the wall of the pantry, and expand the hole in the wall where the kitchen/dining room light switches are! (I think I am getting really, really tired of HOLES appearing in my house!!) This takes another couple of days (since DH can only work on it in the evenings when he gets home from his job) to get the light up, wired, holes patched.....and then DH decides to paint the inside of the pantry! I finally got my kitchen back USABLE a week ago. But, I must say, DH has done a very good job with all of his projects.....he's a very handy guy. But, alas, as of today, STILL no dining room floor!

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