A Crafting Disaster: Floors and Doors....

I am laying in bed looking out at my kitchen (yes the house is that compact that I can see the kitchen from my bed...ha), and I can't believe what we have accomplished in the last year. About a year ago we were finishing our bathroom re-do and still had a very long list of things to do to finish the upstairs. Now we are down to just a few projects and the upstairs of the house will be done. YAY!

Two weekends ago I had the great privilege of going to Home Depot 2 times, and True Value 6 times. Our plan for the weekend was to prep for flooring installation and install a new back door. On Saturday we prepped the floors. Our kitchen has two layers of linoleum in it that we did not want to rip up because it was really old and we had no idea if there was asbestos in it, and our hallway just had the sub floor. We had to bring the hallway floor up to the same height as the kitchen. We went to Menards and they suggested using self leveling compound to do this. I looked at the bag they recommended and instantly started having flash back to mixing up thin set for tile. I instantly hated this idea but I was tired so I threw a bag in the cart and headed for home. Ben and I did a lot of research during the week prior (aka watched YouTube) to see how to use the self leveling compound. It looked relatively easy if you have a square room. We instead have a hallway, with stairs, 2 doorways with carpet, a doorway with tile and freshly painted walls that I did not want full of this cement like stuff. I could just picture what was going to happen and I didn't like it. Honestly if we would have used it we could have a pretty good disaster blog post...but Ben saved me from this disaster. The floors were an 1/8" lower in the hallway then the kitchen. Ben found 1/8" compressed boards at the home depot that we could just screw into the floor and voila a floor the same height as the kitchen.

Getting the boards home was another matter, they came in huge sheets of dimensions I can't remember but lets be honest, they weren't fitting in the Corolla. Ben and I thought maybe True Value would have the same boards and we could tie them on top of his Focus and drive the 1 mile to our house. I get the giggles just thinking of that mental picture. True Value didn't have the boards which I think was a blessing in disguise. Instead we went back to the Home Depot and had them cut each board into 3 pieces so we could fit them in the Corolla. Problem solved.

We got home Ben started cutting boards and I was supposed to screw them into the floor. It took me about 25 tries to get the first screw into the floor. I think Ben was ready to rip the drill from my hands, but I told him I had to figure out how to do it on my own. Eventually I got the hang of it and we put about 150 screws into the floor. If a tornado takes down our house, I promise your our sub-floor will still be in tact. I honestly thought this project was going to take about an hour but somehow it managed to take all day.

On Sunday it was supposed to be 45 degrees outside so we decided this was a good day to install our new back door in our kitchen. I was very nervous about this project. The wood on the bottom of the door jam was rotting away and I was afraid of what we were going to find when we took out the door. To my surprise 2 things happened: 1. The only thing that was rotten was the door, everything around the door was fine, and 2. The door opening was actually square and level. I didn't think there were actually 90 degree angles anywhere in our house. So installing the door wasn't a terrible disaster. We did have to install an extra board underneath the door to bring the door up higher so it would clear our new flooring. Once we put the door in, leveling the door was a tad bit challenging. Ben's strength is definitely not following directions. I swear he reads the directions and picks the step that he likes does those steps and skips the rest. So after some reading and re-reading the directions we had to undo most of our work and start at the beginning again so the door would be level. After we had been working on it for a few hours, I got really hungry, but I knew Ben would want to power through and just get the door done. I was on the edge of being hangry (angry from hunger) so when Ben ran downstairs to get some tool or another I quickly warmed up some leftovers. He came back upstairs to find me sitting at the table eating lunch. I informed him I was on my union mandated lunch break. Ha! I was only allotted about 7 minutes to eat and then it was back to work. We eventually finished installing the door, installed the new lock, put some spray foam insulation around the door and we were done for the day.