When we moved into our Little White House over seven years ago, one thing I just loved was how original and untouched the upstairs was. Oak hardwood flooring and the original yellow pine trim adorned the bedrooms. However, those beautiful oak hardwood floors were covered underneath white carpet from the 70s. Both bedrooms. The stairs. Why people cover beautiful wooden stair treads with white carpet, I'll never know. The carpet was the first thing to go. We removed the carpet from the stairs and our then-spare bedroom. When we got to our bedroom, we then realized that the carpet was a shortcut. Half of our bedroom had the beautiful oak hardwood flooring - perfectly preserved beneath the carpet, and the other half had plywood subfloor. I told myself I could live with the carpeting for awhile rather than look at a subfloor. Time goes by, and life happens. Dogs and cats get sick on the carpet, stains galore. We lived with it, and I was ashamed of our bedroom. It was a place to sleep, and that's it. Fast forward to early this summer, when I reached my tipping point. Have you ever just woke up one morning ready to tear apart your house? I'm sure many of us have, and unfortunately for my husband, I act on those impulses. I decided I had lived with the dirty disco sheep carpet long enough, and today was the day it was coming out. My plan was to paint the subfloor. Anything could be better. When my husband, Tyler, got home from work that afternoon, he was greeted with a bundle of carpet sitting on the steps. Wives, if you tear anything out of your house without your husband's consent, you better have a plan. After the initial shock of "you tore our bedroom apart" subsided, he coyly asked my what my plan was for the carpet, assuming I wouldn't have an answer. I had one. Our neighbor used to put carpet in her garden. Yep - sounds nuts, but it really keeps the weeds down. Since we had a sudden influx of available carpet, we reinstalled the carpet in our backyard garden around our tomatoes and pepper plants. After getting the carpet removed, Tyler suggested we pull up the subfloor and lay red oak flooring to match; it'd look much better. I definitely agreed, that was my preference too, although much more work. We had our small stash of salvaged red oak flooring we got from a jaunt we took near Sargent in the garage, so it made sense to put in the extra work already having the materials on hand. Removing the subfloor was hard work. Using crowbars and hammers, we removed the first portion only to confirm our suspicion - there was no other subfloor underneath, only joists. There was no possible way to lay the matching flooring in the rest of the room. After brainstorming and not wanting to give in to the painted subfloor idea, we came up with a solution. Not surprising, as this is how it usually goes, but my afternoon project had turned into a couple weeks worth of work. You can't cut the joists down 3/4 of an inch to make room for the subfloor and hardwood - that's holding the weight of the second story of the house. Instead, we "sunk" our subfloor. We ran 2x4s along the joists so we could lay the subfloor on top of them and piece the subfloor in between the joists. This part took forever. We slept in the old part of our bedroom for over a week - the other half of the room was rather precarious with holes in the floor as we worked to sink the subfloor. Our boys thought mom and dad's bedroom was so neat all rearranged like that. Once the base work was done, the salvaged flooring went in easy as pie. After getting the floor in, I painted our bedroom, and Tyler worked on trimming out my closet and the two windows on the north side. We installed a floor grate in order to bring some heat upstairs from the fireplace below, and I had fun shopping at a local junktique store to replace our cheap mid-century modern "wheat" shade with a more fitting art-deco shade. We also switched dressers with our boys. I don't think the dusty teal color will be popular with my growing boys in a couple years! I had redone those dressers when I was pregnant with Easton. After PicturesThe moral of the story here is, when you reach your tipping point, go for it. Just have a plan. ;)
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Kathryn HollandWife. Mother. Teacher. Lifelong student. Archives
March 2022
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