Sunday, September 23, 2007

This story starts in the middle

I am sleeping on the wood floor of my dining room. Well, technically not on the actual floor, we put our mattress on it, but still it's not my bedroom. This is the third time in the 10 years that I have been with Wade that I have ended up sleeping in the dining room. But that is a story for another time. How did I end up on the floor? Well, it started on Sunday when we had the bright idea to switch rooms with Henry. Let me just say that my husband cannot help himself. Furniture is constantly moving in my house, rooms are switched every few months. He loves change and he gets so excited about it that he can think of nothing else. So, the switch began. For those of you who have not been in our house let me just say that our house is very small. The rooms are a good size but there are only 6 of them and that counts the bathroom and garage. So when we moved all of our furniture and clothing out of our bedroom it pretty much filled our living room and dining room. We noticed a patch of something strange in the corner of the room and, after pulling back the carpet a bit, Wade discovered that the previous owners had shoved steel wool in a hole in the corner. Which seemed like a silly thing to do, but then Wade told me that it is to keep out mice. Well, we were not having our baby sleeping in a place that could have mice so we decided in investigate further. Wade pulled the carpet all the way back and we found some very very old floors. Our house was built in 1910. It was gutted and rebuilt in 1994. The actual footprint of the house is the same as the original farmhouse but the rest of the structure was supposed to have been renovated. This floor was supposed to be barely 10 years old, but instead it is closer to 100 years old. It is just the old wood with a very thin piece of 100 year old plywood underneath it. It sags in some places, springs under your feet in other places, crack and pops and well, quite honestly, I can't believe that we have lived here for 3 months and have not ended up crashing into the crawl space. The support beams are good, they do not give or bounce when we walk on them, so, Wade is going to put an additional layer of 1 in plywood over the floor, attach it to the support beams, fill in any gaps around the edges and corners and make it so that those old wood floors no longer have any weight on them. It isn't great timing but we planned on working on this room eventually so it just moved to #1 on the list.
So here is the room. It had a tree painted on the wall and clouds and butterflies floating throughout.
Sorry, this picture is a little fuzzy, my camera was dieing so I was shooting fast. Here you can see where they did a major repair on the floor already, something they did not disclose to us when we purchased the house (shame on them!) You can't really see much with this picture but I am not sure how to delete it so here it is.

Here you can see how bad the floor is and you can kind of see the huge one inch gap between the floor boards and the drywall. I painted the walls tonight. It is supposed to be a pale green but right now it looks more beige. We'll see how it looks in the morning.

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