I hope you all had a great Labor Day Weekend.  It’s hard to believe that summer is over (although I’m secretly excited because fall is my favorite!)

We’ve been trying to get as much done as we can before the cold weather sets in, but the more work we do on this house, the more projects we add to our to-do list.  It can be very overwhelming at times, but c’est la vie.  It will all be worth it when we finish!

Here are a few photos of what side #1 of the house looked like when we bought it (there are still tenants in side #2, so we’ll show you that when they move out).

The first thing we did when we got our keys was remove the dirty, wet-dog-scented carpet.  It was everywhere.  Apparently the people who lived there before we bought it had lots of animals they didn’t take care of.  We were hopeful that taking up the carpet would get rid of most of the nastyness, so we went to town.

After removing all of the carpet, we discovered original hardwood floors throughout the entire house!  We also discovered that they were all covered by 4-5 layers of paint.  Why someone would do that, I don’t know, but at least it created a barrier between all of the gross stuff that happened on the carpet and the original hardwood floors.   The bad thing is that the paint was close to impossible to remove.  We first tried using a paint stripper – no luck.  Then we rented two different commercial sanders which barely did anything.  Just a whole lot of paint-tinted sawdust and a lot of floor left to cover.  We decided to stop and come up with another plan.

During that time, we had our floors tested for lead-based paint, which we should have done before even starting our sanding project.  Lead exposure can cause all sorts of health issues, and being that the home was built in 1920, there was a strong possibility that the floors contained lead without us knowing it.  Thankfully, they were negative which was a huge, huge relief.

So we got back to work, and this time tried using a hand planer to remove the paint.  Success!  So far, we’ve only done the living room and dining room floors, but they’re looking really promising!  Once we get the paint off with the planer, we’ll reintroduce the sanders to smooth everything out and finish off the job.

Hand Planer

Wood After Using the Planer

Living Room/Dining Room Progress!

Unfortunately, removing the carpet and doing the floors didn’t completely take the smell away, so we tried washing the walls with a 50/50 vinegar/water mixture.  It helped temporarily, but we noticed it came back after a few days.  We also took off all of the faux wood paneling and discovered lots of layers of paint and old wallpaper, and a huge cockroach problem!

At this point, our hopes of moving into this side of the house relatively soon were out the window.  It got even worse when we started taking down the dropped ceilings in the bedrooms.   We found cockroach poo and mouse poo EVERYWHERE, and called an exterminator to start treating the problem.  The one and only silver lining in all of this is that by taking down the dropped ceilings, we added about a foot of ceiling height in all of our rooms.

Now that the rest of our house is in shambles, it’s time to move onto our next target: the kitchen!  Details coming soon!