Grateful Thoughts July 3, 2010 Our Renos

I am grateful today to once again feel like I have the time to smell the flowers!

Our flowers have been complaining about our lack of attention to them, since the last few weeks we have had our heads down and our tails up... literally!  To install new floors there is a lot of heads down and tails up kind of work.

But today I am grateful to have completed the last four rooms with new floors and whatever other necessary renovations deemed necessary at this time.  PTL!  We now have no wall to wall carpet left in our house... just occasional rugs.

With all the turmoil of the renovations in our house, my blogging has suffered.  But there is no doubt what we are grateful for this weekend.  Equilibrium has been restored to this part of the planet. I even grouted the tile that connects to the wood floor in each doorway to the living room perimeter tiles... so everything is done and we are all moved back into our rooms. 

We didn't do any perimeter tile border like we had done in the main part of the house... and no inset tiles and granite squares.

Only the living room is still a little bit of a mess, as there just were not enough hours in the day to get it put back together as well. We only slept two nights in the living room... which was a little bit like sleeping in Value Village, with all our stuff in boxes stacked around us and our clothes from the closets on the sofas. 

In just three days (two nights) we got our bedroom all dismantled, carpet removed, floor prepared and hardwood installed.  On Friday morning I finished my closet floor, installed baseboards and closet doors... and in the afternoon we moved the furniture back in... and we slept there again last night!  I had no problem falling asleep... or sleeping in either.  We had previously planned to not do our bedroom until after all the company left... (we have three groups coming starting next weekend) but I woke up last Tuesday morning and suggested to Shirley that I would like to get it done now and she agreed. I wanted to get it all behind us while my tools were still warm and my mind was in the groove. (pun intended) I think I will get my second wind and we can push it thru pretty fast!  Shirley helped me with laying out the boards, which really speeded things up.

We had purchased 680 sq. feet of flooring... it was all they had of our color... and I had about 20 square feet in a box left over from before. I calculated as we were almost done our bedroom that I could not do all my closet before running out, but if I used from my 20 square feet of left overs, I could finish the closet... and the change of wood width would not be noticeable to anyone but me.  The pieces above were all that was left from the 680 Sq. ft. and there was about half the box left from my old box that I used in the closet. I had bought all that they had left in the clearance special at the Finishing Store... and it could not have worked out more closely.  I can tell you that in this whole job there was very little waste that went into the kindling box.  From a whole room it would not amount to more than one square foot of waste!

I am so much in love with my new floor for my office too!  Not to mention that the process of removing everything from my office forced an overdue clean up.  When I brought my files back into the filing cabinets, there were two large boxes of papers that I chucked out.  Now all my files are better set up and I feel great about knowing where everything is.  Watching two hours of "Hoarders" on TV a week ago left an impact on me!  We are making lists of things we are going to sell... cameras, electronic stuff, etc. that we are not using. Nothing came back into my office that I am not using... or on the STBS list of "Soon to be Sold."

This is our guest room... which is next door to Shirleys office.  The photo of her office was in my last "Grateful Thoughts" post.  So there you have it. 

My quote of the day:  "Most people never run far enough on their first wind to find out they've got a second. Give your dreams all you've got and you'll be amazed at the energy that comes out of you." –William James