Plywood flooring and our first hot meal

Last weekend our floor was finished. Brent has been working, pretty much, non-stop since Friday morning to apply the finish. And it is beautiful!

Flooring on the main level

This project began with the discovery of a plywood waste product. Brent discovered that the waste from a manufacturing process contained a regular dimension of lumber that could make a beautiful flooring. One of the things I admire about Brent is the ability to see possibilities like this and not be discouraged at the insane amount of work it will require. He milled, cut 12-ish slots for joiners in each plank, joined and glued, filled, sanded, sanded again, stained, and applied the finish. It was "only" 130+ planks :-) Wow!

Most of this floor finishing occurred during a super-cold November that has unveiled the fabulous ability of our house to stay warm - even with windows open and fans running to exhaust the fumes. The radiant heat in the floors is unbelievable. Even though the surface of the floor doesn't feel warm, the heat can be felt on the bottoms of your feed through your shoes. With temperates outside in the teens and twenties, the house never got below 68 degrees. I can't wait to see how nice it will be when all the door knobs are installed and the windows are closed.

Brent will apply the finish on the stairs and landings next.  

A few minor fixes were made to our kitchen cabinets last week and we were able to enjoy our first hot meal at the house. It was only leftovers heated in the microwave, but still! It was nice to have something  homemade (not Sonic, Subway, or McDonalds).

Brent warming our lunch in the microwave.

We are almost home!

Finally…electricity and indoor plumbing

This may only be incredibly exciting to me - but we have a toilet! We don't have the faucets connected for the sinks in the bathroom yet. But, still, a toilet that flushes? What person wouldn't love that after more than a year of a Porta-Potty?

It's beautiful :-)

We also have all of the lights installed now (thanks to Jeff with Teague Electric). I was so happy to see last night that the kitchen is well lit. Our stove is also in place and we discovered that the countertop for the island needs to be rebuilt because the opening for the slide-in range is a little too deep. Other than that it looks great.

All lights are installed.

Brent and I did a lot of work shopping at ReStore and on Craigslist to get most of the light fixtures. We even got our ceiling fans - and they are really cool! It feels good to re-use these things - and in almost all cases it saved us a ton of money.

Even the bathroom cabinets, countertops and faucets came from Craigslist. Yesterday we did some shopping and found more things at ReStore. Our "new" toilets are a matching, pristine set from the 87th Street store. They were complete with working flush mechanisms and cost us $25 each. That's an incredible deal! And they look brand new. All that made it easy to get over the idea of a used toilet. And what is there to be squeamish about after a year of using a Porta-potty?

Brent will focus on getting the bathrooms totally functional this weekend. Then he will shift his attention to the monumental task of staining and finishing the main level flooring. This will include an intensive cleaning job for the upstairs to eliminate all of the construction dust.

The rest of us will continue to "chip" away at the painting job. That job gets closer everyday to being finished. We will finish up the downstairs and start on the master bedroom. Logan painted the entire half-bath side of the master bathroom yesterday. We are very lucky to have such a hard-working son :-)

A little rip-tearing recycling project

Brent and I are pretty lucky. (Okay, so maybe we've both had some super bad luck in the past, but today we are pretty fortunate.) We both have day jobs at a place full of interesting, creative, talented people. And those people like to share their creative fun with us.

So the other day at my job I learned how to make a rag rug.
(It was really on my lunch hour.)

Here's my rug! And those sheets to the right are the "yarn."

When I heard a co-worker was doing a demonstration of how to crochet rugs from rags, I had to go. It sounded a lot like something I had seen while looking for ways to use the coarser parts of alpaca fleece. There was this pattern online for crocheting a rug from a super-bulky alpaca yarn. I didn't have any of the yarn the pattern needed. But, if I could do the same thing with old fabric, I wanted to try because it looked really pretty.

Making my rug was really easy and for bonus fun I got to tear up sheets! I knew we had some sheets that were unmatched or torn or stained. So I went through our closets and found 3 that I thought would go together. I made tiny cuts every 1 1/2 inches along one edge, then at each cut started to rip the fabric. (Not sure this will work on a knit fabric - these were woven.) There is a simple daisy-chain method of connecting the resulting strips together to make them as long as you want. Then, using a "P" size hook, single crochet in a spiral adding an increase every-so-often. More strips are added as you need until you're done.

Next, I'm going to try to make a rectangular rug - actually 2 since they're free. We need some to match this one in our bathroom. And, why not? I've got more sheets.

Yup, I'm pretty lucky.