Monday, February 2, 2009

Day 5 - The floors!

Tonight after work, we ripped up the (ugly, burgundy, indoor/outdoor) carpet upstairs! I'm pretty impressed with what we got done - all the carpet and padding is up, and the staples and tack strips are out of 2 of the rooms. So just the smallest room and a bit of the hallway are left! (Oh, and the stairs. We left the carpet there for now, for traction and Nutmeg's benefit) The floors in the two rooms we finished tonight are in really good shape and are rather nice-looking - although, interestingly they seem to be different colors. One is a reddish-brown, the other is a maple yellow. The hallway and the small room have a layer of black glue or something on them that will need to be scraped off. It's interesting to peel away layers of the house and wonder what the thought process was behind the choices people made. Why would they have put linoleum (or whatever it was) in only one room and the hall? And, really, every staple I pulled up made me wonder why anyone would have covered up such pretty wood floors anyway.



Two things pain me about the house, so far. One - that we're taking out the old windows upstairs. They're the original windows to the house, 6-over-6, individually paned, double-hung glass windows. With the original weight mechanisms intact in all of them. Bryan pulled off the trim around the windows to see what we're dealing with, and seeing the weights hanging beside each of the windows is very cool. I really wish we didn't have to do it, but they're old, painted all over, some of the frames are rotting, and they aren't particularly conservative on the energy front. But, I've read just enough about historic preservation of old homes to feel like we're desecrating the spirit of the house by pulling out the windows and replacing them with newfangled vinyl windows. There's not very much of the original character left inside the house, so I feel rather wistful about removing something so integral to the original structure.

Number 2 - the fireplace. We have a red brick wood-burning fireplace in the living room on the main level. However, someone in the past decided it would be a great idea to afix a ceramic tile border directly onto the brick around the fireplace opening. Not interesting, unique, artistic tile, mind you, but boring, run-of-the-mill 8" x 8" creamy beige ceramic floor tile. Why?? What did that lovely red brick ever do to them? And since the tile is grouted directly to the brick, the chances of removing it are pretty slim.

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