The Living Room...egads!

[caption id="attachment_165" align="alignleft" width="150" caption="Living Room, south wall, before."][/caption]

Initially, I thought all I needed to do was declutter, clean, repaint the white walls and ceiling, and even though the carpeting was NOT wall-to-wall, just clean it up.

Well... of course that's not what happened!

First, the easy part: I sold the recliner and couch, which did NOT match and were totally the wrong size for the room, at my yard sale,
and replaced both with a 2-piece used sectional in pretty good condition I got totally for free from the Pikes Peak Community Action Agency.  Carl over there was so happy to have someone take it off their hands (taking up a lot of space in the Free pile!) that he arranged for someone to haul it the three blocks to my house! Granted, it took an entire bottle of Febreeze to kill the musty smell
of it, but it looks great, I think, and the dogs LOVE it.  Especially Coco, who can still get to her favorite sleeping corner in the house
by simply walking behind it, but Binky can't cause he's too big - so she now has a place which is totally Binky-free!  She's quite happy
about that :)  Although she wasn't happy about the commotion I made tearing the living room apart, I think I've been forgiven.

All the steam cleaning in the world (and various chemical agents) would not take the black paint stain out of the carpet.  I really debated about removing it, because it does help keep the room warm during the winter and it was a pain to get it into the living room to begin with, but at the same time, showing a house with a carpet that is one foot two small on two sides for the room, that doesn't meet up at the kitchen arch, is seriously stained, and frankly, rather tatty looking, just ain't going to work.  Next-door-neighbor had given it to me when he replaced the carpeting in his house, his daughter's 2-year-old son was the "artist" who painted on it, and despite that, I really did like having it in there.  But it had to go.  Removing it was a pain - it's big and heavy - but by cutting it into
smaller pieces, I was able to tackle that job relatively easily.

I knew the wood floors would need some work... they've become pretty worn, but fortunately, they're oiled floors.  That means I don't need
to sand and deal with expensive, life-threatening urethanes and all to get it to look good, I just need to get some Tung nut oil and reoil
 them.  But of course, *NOBODY* stocks traditional Tung oil anymore! All the so-called Tung oil products at Home Depot and Lowes are just
urethane and varnish products with a touch of tung oil in them!  I did find an old can of tung oil in the garage, probably dating to the 1950s when the floor was last properly finished, but it only had a small amount left in it.  I did use that - it was barely enough to do a very, very light first coat over the floor, which did make a big difference (parts of the floor, especially in the traffic areas, are practically bare), and found a place on the 'net that sells proper, pure Tung oil for about $17 for a half- gallon, which should be more than enough for me to do another coat or two in the living room, and also touch up the office floor when I pull the carpet out of there. I'll order it when I next get paid, and finish the floor then.  Some areas will need more than a few coats to get them to even out and match the rest of the floor, but that's okay with me.

[caption id="attachment_169" align="alignright" width="108" caption="Starting to re-oil the floor"][/caption]

There's several reasons I'm sticking with the original wood floor treatment.  Tung oil is completely natural - it's the oil from the
Tung nut - and has a very pleasant, somewhat-peanutty, odor.  You don't need to wear respirator masks when installing it, and can even handle it with bare hands if you really wanted to.  I can't, because I'm still somewhat allergic to nuts, but latex gloves does the trick. An oiled floor, if it becomes damaged, doesn't require you to refinish the entire thing - just sand where the damage is, and then brush some
oil on it till it matches.  The oil blends right in to the existing area.  The more you oil it, the darker and shinier the finish.  You don't need  anything special to clean or care for it - can wash the floor with simply water, and should it get worn off (like in the case of my floor), just brush some oil on, and lightly hand buff it, and you're done.  Finally, I'm using it because that's what's always been used on the hardwood floors in this house: tung oil.  Never a touch of stain, never any harsh chemicals :) Of course, there is one downside: it takes about two days to dry out enough to move furniture back on it and walk on it without sticking, and about a month to fully "cure" (get hard), but I don't mind that.

The walls turned into a nightmare.  When I first started to paint them, the existing paint started to peel off!!  Apparently the last time this room was painted (which was probably around 1984!), either extremely cheap paint was used, or the surface wasn't prepared right - likely both.  I knew I was going to have some problems covering all the yellowed and stained walls, but the existing paint just simply falling off the wall wasn't a problem I was prepared for.

Fortunately, there was a simple solution: TSP, the same stuff I used on the tiles in the kitchen!  Ya know, that big box of TSP I bought
about ten years ago for like $4 sure has come in handy more than I can count!  I had to scrub all three white walls, AND the ceiling, with
TSP, and even sand some places.  Lots of spackling was needed, too, then I could finally paint.  It took three days... sigh... I hate
painting ceilings!  And parts of the room still need another coat of paint, but that will wait, also, for payday, when I can buy another
gallon :)  Still, the walls are nice and white, the ceiling reflects too much light, but it looks good :)

I sold the dresser I was using as a TV stand, and repurposed the wood shelves I used to have in the middle of the kitchen.  I stained the
wood shelves with a woodstain mis-tint I picked up at Home Depot for $1.00, and trimmed it in "black leatherette" contact paper.  Yes, I really love contact paper :)  I did the same to the dvd-stand just left of the door, so it looks like a matched set of furniture now.  I removed the shelving behind the door that I had all my "back up copies" of dvds (read that the way you want *grins*), as my realtor has suggested that having piles of "back up" dvds laying around the living room for strangers to comment on may not be a very good idea...   They are now boxed up.  I pulled out all the wiring I had from the living room to the bedroom and office, and replaced it with a used wireless media networking system I picked up at Goodwill for $7.75 ...that way I still can stream any video or music I want from the living room to the office or bedroom or back to the living room, but no longer have a bunch of wires hanging out all over the place!  I unhooked the home theater sound system speakers from the wall, and just have them neatly sitting on the shelves around the tv... do miss the true surround sound of having the speakers placed properly, but it
still sounds good.  Besides, wires draped over the windows just isn't very attractive :)

I've only rehung two pictures, although I think the corner behind the sectional looks too bare now, I think it's better than making new
holes in walls I just spent what feels like a year patching to hang more pictures. :)  I'm leaving the mural on the arch wall as it is (although I did finish painting the flowers, and cleaned it)... I'll offer to paint over it to whoever buys the house if they want me to. I love it too much to paint over it while the house is still mine :)

So there you have it... Laura's new, nice, clean, neat, ready-to-show, living room.  Sure, still a few things to do ... some touch-up paint,
floor needs more oiling, ceiling fan needs cleaning, finish the molding around the front window, and a throw-rug (currently hanging on the fence after being hosed down and cleaned) to lay on the floor, but it's done.

Here's the best part:  Total cost: $45.11

Tung Oil, $15.95 with free shipping (will use in office later, too)
Gallon of White Paint, $7.44
Blue wood stain, $1.07
"Black Leatherette" Contact paper, $5.95 (will use in office later, too)
Yet more spackling, $1.95 (I should just break down and buy the big jug)
Two new end tables, from GoodWill, $5  (they were still in the box, unopened! Only one in the picture, the other one will be placed by the door after I finish the floor)
New (used) wireless media streaming center from Goodwill $7.75

Sorry the final photo is kinda warped looking... I'm still getting the hang of the panoramic photo feature :)

It echos, just like the kitchen :)

[caption id="attachment_171" align="aligncenter" width="300" caption="Living room, done"][/caption]

The Kitchen, Days 4 and 5: The Pantry Wall Continued

These last few days have been spent dealing with the rest of the kitchen floor and finishing the pantry wall.  Underneath where the refrigerator was, in front of the pantry door, the floor had buckled due to water damage caused by a mouse chewing through the water line to the ice maker about six years ago.  Some water had seeped around the edges of the linoleum in the pantry at the time, causing water to get under the flooring.  But I thought at the time that some judicious hole-drilling would minimize that problem, and by drilling holes, most if not all of that inter-floor-layer water would drain to the crawl space and out.  Which, in fact, it did.

In and of itself, I wasn't too worried about the buckling, either, since I thought it was just the linoleum flooring that had buckled, and knew over time it would eventually lay back down flat, especially with the heat of the refrigerator on top of it.  Well, as I discovered, of course that didn't happen.  I cut into the 1980's layer of linoleum, hoping I could just do some trimming of it to get it to lay flat then cover it up with the rest of
the stick-on tiles I had from when I first covered the floor some eight years ago.  Well, below the 1980's layer is the 1970's layer of
linoleum, of which below that is a layer of thin plywood, sitting over the 1960's layer of linoleum.  (I swear every owner of this house has
added a layer of flooring in the kitchen, myself included!)  When the flood of water from the mouse-chewed water line seeped through those holes I drilled in an effort to avoid water spreading between the layers, desiring for it to just drain out, I inadvertently exposed that plywood to the water.  It buckled.  Bad.  No quick cutting and splicing here, damn it.  A few screws to "pull" it down to the subfloor won't work, either.

By the way, the main reason I didn't just pull the entire kitchen floor up when I recovered it eight years ago is simple:  Linoleum flooring prior to the early 1980s contains asbestos.  I already created a hazardous waste situation when I remodeled the bathroom
nearly ten years ago.  Back then, not knowing better, I actually pulled all five layers of flooring up in the bathroom, three layers of various linoleum, two subfloors, and a layer of 1950s Tri-Bond plastic tile (man did someone love that stuff ... it was and still is all over this house!)... I'll never forget the panic I caused my garbageman at the time when he saw a trash can full of asbestos-laden, broken-up, loosely piled ancient flooring in the can!  (Never had a garbageman knock on my door, red-faced and hysterical, shouting at me, "What the hell are you doing!?!"  Granted, he used a much stronger curse word than "hell"...)  Somewhere around here I'll have to dig up the warning letter I received from some government agency or another (can't remember which) about proper handling of hazardous waste... never had a garbageman report me to authorities before, either.  Don't ask how much of that crap I may have breathed in at the time... I don't know. Fortunately, it was a small bathroom, only 5x6 feet of flooring (five or six layers thick) was removed...

Anyway back to the kitchen floor.  I did get lucky, as the buckling ended at the plywood layer.  The 1960s and below layer weren't buckled; I would only need to deal with this one area of buckled plywood.  Unfortunately, there was no way to just screw the floor down where it was buckled, hoping to suck it down to the subfloor and level it out.  This wasn't something that I could just ignore, either, because every time I open the pantry door, it rubs the floor there and almost gets stuck.  No way to add my layer of flooring and still open the door!  Plus the pantry will be (is now) a high traffic area, so this particular buckle is noticeable, very noticeable.

Fortunately, I happen to own more power tools than most men.  A fact that has both weirdly excited and deeply disturbed more than one
boyfriend over the years.  Pulled out the handy-dandy RotoZip, cut just the plywood layer out, limiting myself to just the area that was buckled.  Placed a few decking screws here and there to reduce the lesser buckling in the area, and went to grab the bucket of self-leveling cement that I know I have out in the Garage of Doom to fill in the hole I just created so the floor isn't 1/4" lower there.

Damn it, the stuff has dried rock-solid... that bucket's been in the garage for at least six years!! It shouldn't have dried out!

Grrr... let's try some thinset mortar.  If it's good enough for ceramic tiles, it should be good enough to level out this hole... nope.  It has dried solid, too, and it's only 8 or 9 years old! Starting to regret the decision to try to get everything done using only stuff I already have on hand... *sigh*...

Well, I could use spackling paste... nah, that's not a good idea :) Not only would it take a week or longer for a 1/4" thick layer of
spackling paste to dry, it'll crack and crumble under repeated foot traffic.

Ahh hah!  The Garage of Doom does contain a solution - silicon caulking!!  Fortunately, I've got tubes of the stuff - I stocked up a few years ago when some home improvement store or another went out of business, got it for like 50 cents a tube! (Pack Rat Alert!) Of courses I can't find
the dang caulking gun, I own three of them (don't ask) and can't find a single one... but no worries.  It's not like I'm needing this to be
a nice, fine, line.  I just tore open the tube and used a putty knife to spread it out, reminding myself it doesn't need to be perfect, just needs to be good.  (I may not have inherited my mother's neatness, but I sure did inherit her  perfectionism! *grins*)  Caulking is flexible and waterproof, so it'll do the trick perfectly. Some bleach on the patches of mold (fortunately, dried and dead mold) that I exposed, and let it all dry overnight. 

Well, actually, as it turns out, it took about three days for the silicon to completely set and dry.

After the silicon dried, I put down the rest of the stick-on floor tile, actually have enough left over that I could retile the floor in the pantry.
 I think I'll stew on that for a while... if I cover the pantry floor, there will be NO extra tiles left for future repairs, should any be needed.  I think I'll leave it as a future owner option to use that spare tile for the pantry or not.

The kitchen is almost done.  I just need to clean up the mess I made doing all this work, clean the ceiling, move the table and chairs in, and it's all done and ready to go. Probably hang some sort of picture on the wall above the table, it's kinda stark looking there.  It is so decluttered, it actually ECHOs in here!

The Kitchen, Day Two: The Orange Wall

I'm approaching the kitchen one wall at a time.  Yesterday was the backsplash wall, today is the oven wall... meaning, the wall where the oven and my half-size dishwasher are.   Also known as the Orange wall :)

I'm also rearranging the appliances, to make room for a table so my kitchen can be a proper "eat-in" kitchen.  It always was meant to be, but I never eat in the kitchen, I eat on the couch watching TV like most Americans do!  So years ago, I moved the fridge to the pantry wall, installed additional cabinets, tons of shelving, and added a half-size dishwasher.  I now have to basically undo everything I did eight-ten years ago, so the kitchen will show better.

Besides, it's cluttered as all hell.  Honestly, it's not quite as bad as this photo shows... well, not normally... anyway, I pulled the dishwasher and oven out, and finished laying the floor under where the oven was, a reflooring project I started using 12 inch square stick-on floor tiles but never finished.  I also had to replace two floor tiles by the door that had torn up.

Took shelves down, patched holes, resurfaced the wall next to the oven where the tiles had fallen down some years ago...what a BITCH that was!!  Ended up having to sand it down and layer it back up with spackling paste in like 20 very thin layers!

Washed the wall :)  That orange is brighter now, yes indeedy! 

Any ideas on how to clean a ceiling?  Mine is, no joke, dusty!!  And of course, it being a kitchen, much dusty-steam has settled on the
ceiling.  Really don't want to repaint it... although I probably should consider repainting the ceiling solid white *sigh*

Got the  fridge pulled away from wall and ready to move into place.

Unfortunately, I couldn't leave the shelves up above the stove like I originally planned... seems my fridge is a bit wider than the original fridge,
and, in fact, wider than I realized... only way to keep the shelves was to move the bracket over about 8 inches towards the cabinets...and
then the door to the cabinet would bump into the edge of the shelves!!  Sure, could move the right side bracket, then cut the shelves to fit,
but screw it, too much work :)  Keep it open looking this way... hang some picture above the stove, or a big fun 50's-60's style clock (no
doubt I can find something funky at goodwill) over the oven.

Besides, turns out the shelves were too high for the microwave, I couldn't reach it once on the shelf, not being freakishly tall or anything :)

The silver with the orange and the black trim really pops, don't you think?