Like a
Anyway, that's about to change with this entry, and in true DBR fashion, when Belle goes to have an adventure, she goes big. ;)
2011 is quite a year for Belle really, and in speaking of trifectas, she doesn't just have one or two, but three big achievements this year! Starting it off with our scheduled wedding in less than a month's time, she followed it up by finally becoming a licensed Marriage and Family Therapist.
And as if those two are not enough to assert that she's a full-blown grown up (which is really a never-ending quest), she goes and buys a house on her own. :)
the house
Not quite a white picket-fence, but it's the 21st century;
nothing says security better than heavy-duty chain links!
A bit of a short-sale find in the current buyer's market of houses, I think Belle found this little gem early this year, and since then she's learned the ins-and-outs of homebuying 101 until she finally took hold of the house keys about a month or so ago. Or at least, she learned them during the process, but has since purged them off her system now that it's all over with. She was quite traumatized throughout it, you know.
Fortunately, it isn't something of a fixer-upper project house; not something to be flipped then sold for a profit. In motorcycle terms, the house was a Turn-Key house; just get on the damn thing and go.
However, Belle, being the expert home-buyer that she is, was quick to set her mind on overhauling the interior floors and repainting the walls. With the exception of the kitchen and the bathroom, the living room and both of the bedrooms were covered in carpet, so the first order of business for Belle was to remove them, and depending on what was underneath, maybe put laminate flooring for the three rooms. Kitchen floor was with linoleum, to which Belle is apparently allergic to (no, not really, but yes, really), so she wanted laminate flooring in that room as well.
Seeing as neither one of us knew anything about flooring, we decided to commission my uncle Robert for the job, being of someone who does that line of work among many others. But until he was able to get started, we started up the process of repainting the walls.
the work
One of the four walls for the living room was adorned with faux-hardwood plywood, of which Belle wasn't exactly thrilled about. So she gave me the go-ahead to go ballistic on the damn thing.
Yes, those are flip-flops. I'm steel-toed though!
It's like putting a red blindfold on a bull, then letting it loose in a glass museum. :)
Then came hours of spraying and wiping TSP off of the walls to clean them, then spackling the spack out of the holes, all for the pain-staking prep-work process of painting. I got to prep most of the rooms and started to paint the corners of the wall in the master bedroom when my uncle finally arrived. At this point, Belle was already exhausted from the mental stress of the work she wasn't doing, so she gave up and just commissioned my Uncle to do the paint job as well.
The poor thing.
Belle, I mean.
Belle chose sage for both of the bedrooms.
I think it's peppermint!
Then my uncle tackled the carpet flooring, which was when we discovered we struck [tainted] gold.
the floor
Living room sans carpet.
Right underneath the carpet seemed to be the original hardwood flooring from when the house was built in the 50's. Tainted though not just for surface wear, but because some panels were warped, and worse of all, there were cuts perpendicular against multiple panels.
It's like someone got a hold of a reciprocating
saw too early too soon.
There were cuts in multiple spots for reasons we can't discern; at random places on the floor of the living room, and some minor ones in the master bedroom. No rhyme or reason we can tell.
Luckily, my uncle was clever enough to make do with what we had left; with some trimming where the major cuts took place, and rearranging the different sized panels, we were able to reuse the existing hardwood flooring to eliminate the gashes. The warped panel(s) were not salvageable, but we were lucky to find a lumber yard that still sold this style of hardwood. My uncle noted that like laminate flooring, hardwood floors nowadays were thicker than what we had, so it was great that we were able to source some needed panels from the lumber yard we found that matched the thickness of the existing hardwood.
It didn't matter that the replacement panels did not have the same finish, as Belle wanted the floors to be refinished a darker stain anyway.
So with the fixes in place, next up was sanding the old finish to make way for the darker stain. This in itself was a little adventure of its own; we had to do two trips to Home Depot for the rental orbital sander as the first one would crap out on us. Thankfully, Home Depot was gracious enough to reset our 1-day rental agreement at no extra charge, which worked out fortuitously because we over-estimated the process. In no way did the multiple-sanding it took for all the rooms took one day, unless maybe if we worked through the night.
In the end though, it all worked out as intended, and as of writing this entry, my uncle should be putting the semi-gloss finish on the newly stained flooring for all three rooms.
On top of that, the laminate flooring in the kitchen was knocked out of the park in one afternoon. We were a bit worried about doing this as the kitchen floor actually had a slope to it. To the naked eye it wasn't easily discernable at a passing glance, but drop a marble on the center of the kitchen floor, and you'll find it rolling down the slope. My concern was that the laminate flooring over the kitchen floor/slope would leave substantial gap in between, dipping upon load and maybe straining the laminate flooring in the long-term.
So far though, seems like the laminate flooring worked out better than I dreaded, and the darker finish on them helped to mask any sign that the flooring was uneven. We'll just have to see how they hold up in the long run.
the rest
We're due to start our move into the house in the coming week, so all that's left now is to put the finishing touches; finish off the paint to the corners, tack the mouldings back on the wall, repaint the window sills/door frames/cabinets/etc, install an iron screen door to the front, new curtains/blinds, and perhaps a handful of other little things to finish off the improvements done to the house.
It's never really done though, obviously, and next on the immediate list of things to do would be to pave a portion of the front lawn to make the space actually useable, and eventually install (an attached) deck in the backyard to the kitchen side, which means also installing a sliding door in the kitchen. There is definitely more to come. All in due time, however, cause for now I think we really want to just settle into what would be our first home.
the proud
Funny, as Belle actually gets a little irked whenever I refer to the house as hers.
"She wants to do this and that to her house."
But you know, I'm not detaching myself from her and this house. Of course it's going to be our home, but to me, this is her house.
And I'm proud of that.
I'm proud to say that because I'm proud of what she's done. She did this and she pulled it off. I'm proud of Belle taking charge of her life, in the world that she's making for herself.
It's Belle's world now.
Rusty and I?
Well, we're just living in it. :)
P.S. Maybe Belle's next adventure would be to write her own blog entry!
