Tag: House

We have floors!

~ Heather Walter ~ Leave a comment

After lots and lots of hard work on Todd’s part, I am happy to report that we have hardwood floors!  He finished them this morning by laying the remaining pieces in the pantry.  We calculated that we would need 800 square feet of wood.  We purchased 850 square feet.  We have 2 boxes, (44 square feet), left over.  Todd managed to create very little scrap!


The pantry floor:



Transition from kitchen to dining room:



We found a new base moulding at Lowe’s today and determined what we would like to do for our door frames downstairs.  Our house is coming together!  We have decided to go with a larger base moulding in order to cover the 1/2-inch gap between the edges of the hardwood and the walls.  The gap was left so the wood has room to expand and contract as necessary.  We
are hoping that the larger moulding will work out well so that we don’t have to use the quarter-round on top of the moulding.


Today, Todd began work on the downstairs bath. He got the door hung, so there will be some privacy.



We bought a new vanity today, as well. 



Isaac is officially a Walter now that he’s been to Lowe’s twice in one day. We originally had 3 bathroom vanity candidates. The first, and most viable, option was the vanity in the original half-bath. That one completely disintegrated when we moved it to the garage a few months ago. The other 2 were from the master bath. We needed to fill a 37″ wide space. One vanity was 32″ wide; the other was 39″. Back to Lowe’s!





Finally, the most amusing part of our day. I didn’t have a chance to get to HEB today, so we ordered Chinese for dinner. When the driver arrived, she said, “Wow! He was right! The other driver told me to check out your floors.” She mentioned that we were still on concrete the first time she came. Apparently, we order Chinese enough that our house is a topic of conversation. I’m not entirely sure I like what that implies about my cooking.

Home Improvement Update

~ Heather Walter ~ Leave a comment

Todd has continued to work on our hardwood floors this weekend.  This has been no minor feat!  He bought a flooring nailer several weeks ago to be able to “staple” the floors down.  I don’t know a whole lot about it other than it is connected to the air compressor and apparently makes life much easier when it’s working properly.  Yesterday, it jammed and stopped working.  It had started to jam after every hit, but finally it quit altogether.  Todd took it back to Harbor Freight, who allowed him to turn it in and replace it with a new one.  He brought the replacement nailer home and, lo and behold, it broke.  I don’t think he even used it for a full 30 minutes before it jammed.  In the process of trying to unstick the very thorough jam, something broke, so Todd took it back to Harbor Freight, as well.  They were closed.  


Jackson was assessing the progress last night:



Today has been much more successful.  Todd got yet another nailer from Harbor Freight this morning.  He’s finished most of the kitchen floors now.  They look so terrific!  He also finished most of the entry, half-bath, and closet downstairs.  The only things left to do have to be glued down, so he is officially finished with the staples.  


This is the view of our entry:



This is the kitchen floor:



Dave and Kristin have the same floors in their kitchen, so it’s neat to know that we have that little connection.


We just learned that we were incredibly fortunate with all of the crazy wind and rain from Tropical Storm Hermine.  At least one life in Austin was lost and there was a great deal of property damage to many homes in the area due to flooding.  As it turns out, we are remarkably blessed. The next door neighbors had flooding in one of the rooms in their house.  Across the street, our neighbor, Joe, had so much water pressing against his garage doors that he opened the doors and just allowed the water to flow in one side and out the other through the garage.  The neighbors across the next street from Joe (about 2 houses down from us) had 5 rooms damaged to the point of pulling out all of the carpets, knocking out the bottom 4 feet of drywall and replacing all of the insulation for mold remediation.  Their names are also Dave and Judy, like Todd’s parents.  Across the back of our house, you can see where there is a debris line from the water gushing across our back porch.  It is a miracle that we didn’t have any flooding in our home!!!  This would have been awful given that Todd is still in the process of laying floors  – it would suck to be halfway through and have them ruined.