With the painting done on Friday of the weekend before last Joe and I tackled the new floors that needed to be laid in the guest bedroom and in the entry/dining room. It came out to be about 500 square feet of new pine floors. I went very inexpensive and rebellious with these new floors. No, they did not come in a box that said “flooring” on the side of it. They’re just 1x4s of the lowest grade pine and I love them! We put the miter saw outside by his truck full of wood and I cut while he laid down! After all day Saturday and most of Sunday we got it done.
This last weekend Joe and I both took July 3rd off of work so we could start sanding down the whole house! For years his family has had the tradition of going to a cabin up north on July 4th weekend and spending it together. Joe made the mature decision to forgo the holiday weekend and work on the house instead. He chose responsibility and a weekend of work over fun, I was relieved because otherwise I would have been here alone. This house needs to be done by our wedding in two months. I spent four nights this week after work prepping for sanding. It took ALL day Friday but we got the entire house sanded down and ready for stain!
It took me eight hours on my hands and knees with my orbital palm sander getting the edges and everything Joe couldn’t get with the big floor sander we rented. Oh my gosh my poor knees. But the floors look so good! The original floors in the kitchen and the entire floor of the master bedroom look like cedar! The floors in the living room and the main floor bathroom look more like oak. It is incredibly marked up though and we had many patches so there was no choice but to stain them dark 🙁 However, they also look fantastic stained, can’t wait to show you guys! With the floors sanded down Joe looked at me Saturday morning and said, “Let’s build the deck.” The deck materials had arrived Friday afternoon so I said, “Ok.”
We hit it as hard as we could on Saturday and Sunday getting the ledger boards up and posts in and dug as quickly as possible. Then we got the rest of the braces done so I could put up all 80 of our joist hangers (ugh) I had to head back to the store twice and we bought them out of screws but by Sunday afternoon we had half of the deck boards down and everything else finished! We will have a railing eventually but for all intensive purposes the deck will be done within the next couple of days with Joe putting on deck boards down. It feels so great to get so much done, I hope Joe feels the same but there was absolutely nothing else I would have rather done this weekend then work on this house. We are getting there!