Planning ahead, to the flooring and beyond!

I feel like I’ve turned another corner with the house. I’ve constantly had to do bits and pieces of things all over the house to be ready for one contractor after another. I’ve started low priority things during downtime and not finished them. And I ended up spending half the summer siding the cantilever. Which I still love. But now, my plumber is coming (when he gets back from vacation) to hook up my bathtub and I’m getting that patio door installed, and other than those things, no other contractors are coming in until I have the drywall taped. I’m free to work at my own pace!

So does this mean that I’m done skipping around? No! My next order of business is doing the jobs that will get rid of all the piles of junk that are in my way. I’m putting the floors down before the walls are up. And I don’t even think that’s crazy. But I want all this crap gone. And by gone, I mean installed.

It doesn’t even fit in the room. I had to fit it through the hole that formed in the wall when my electrician so carefully cut it out for the wiring. And this is one of the few plaster walls I thought I could have kept.

The first order of business is patching the floors in the front bedroom. They were cut open when the radiators went in (I think) in the 1930’s and patched crudely. I pulled the patches out ages ago; now I need to fill them in better.

If you’ll recall, I decided over a year ago that I’d keep the awesome random width pine floors that are original to the house as the finished floors upstairs, and then ripped them out of the back bedroom because the floor sloped enough to make me feel like I was losing my balance. Now they’re going back in. Because being uncomplicated is for the weak.

So once I’ve patched under the radiators, I can cut all the bad spots out of all the floors and figure out how much usable flooring I actually own. Part of my back bedroom is where the bathtub used to be, and there was no flooring under it, somehow. It never fell through to the kitchen, and that’s what counts. And then some of the flooring was water damaged, and even though I was careful, some of it broke when I was pulling it up. And I broke off so much of the original tongues that it’s all gonna have to be glued down now. Without modern materials I’d never be able to make the place look old.

Luckily, I can buy the same flooring from Philadelphia Salvage. It’s not cheap, but I think I’ll come out SLIGHTLY under what I would pay for a boring floor at Lumber Liquidators. It’s 3 times more expensive per square foot, but I won’t need the whole room. Except I will need to do way more work. And it will be way cooler, hopefully. Nail holes and all.

And once that’s done, I’m free to drywall the whole second floor and bring my stuff back upstairs!