Living Room is Tiled!

It's done! And it looks so good. Good things are worth waiting for. :)

And what do I plan to do for an encore? The kitchen floor, of course. I am going to continue the tile into the kitchen, through the utility room to match the floor already in the bathroom.

I'm looking forward to this winter when I will sit in my favorite chair, watch a little TV and knit -- and admire my new floor. :)

(No knitting right now. I'm too busy doing other things.)

BACK AT IT!

The divorce is final; the dust has settled and I've gotten on with my life. This summer I've continued the never ending saga of weeding three houses worth of stuff to fit one small bungalow. No matter how much I throw away, there is still TOO MUCH STUFF! (Hm.. I got rid of one husband. Does that count for housecleaning??)

The good news is I have emptied the garage enough that both cars can now be parked inside at the same time! (what a concept.) :)

I had wanted to wait until it was time to install the hardwood floors before I put flooring in the living room. Since I can't predict when that will be, I've opted for Plan B. As you can tell from the first photo, our painted floor held up pretty well for three years, but the paint is wearing off. I could repaint it, but I want a more long-term solution. I chose self-stick tile.

I started putting down self-stick tile at the beginning of August. It is half finished now and looking really good. I need to make another trip to Home Depot for more tile, then the entire living room will be done! Done! Wow!!! I will be able to mop and not leave shreds of mop fibers caught to the particle board.

It's the little things that make me happy.

Painted Walls!

Look at that! The walls are painted! We're looking like someone lives here!! It's been a busy two months. There are mountains of boxes (mostly empty) still on the back porch. Pat doesn't want to overwhelm the garbage man by giving him all of them at once. I'm disparing at ever finding a place for the contents of the rest of them.

The living room is coming along nicely. It will be spring (tax refund time) before we lay the floor. That's okay. I will wait to get the floors I want. In the mean time we have two big rugs that keep the dust off our feet. The cats and Hagar enjoy sleeping on them. We'll probably keep them after we lay the hardwood floors. If we didn't the critters would never forgive us.

Horsehair Plaster

Last summer Pat and our brother-in-law, Robert, began The Project. Pat has worked in construction for over 15 years, but he had never met horsehair plaster before. The first room they tackled was the living room. Ok, the ONLY room they tackled was the living room. (My old bedroom, the kitchen, the utility room and the bathroom will be stripped of their horsehair plaster at a future date -- a very future date!)

When the house was built in 1903, plaster was mixed with sand and horsehair to give it body, then laid over the closely placed lathes you see in the picture. Pat and Robert only stripped one room down to it's lathe, but they took many, many trips to the dump with barrels of plaster. One load alone weighed close to a ton.

Pat had worried if the walls could support the gypsum board replacement he intended to use. After finding out the weight of what they took off, Robert declared "The walls will heave a sigh of relief to only hold gypsum board."

I don't know about the walls, but Pat and Robert were heaving sighs of relief when all they had to do was put up gypsum board. The walls were easy; then they had to figure out how to do the ceiling. They didn't have a ceiling jack for that part, but they found that Robert (6'2") standing on a low scaffold of boards and concrete blocks was just the right height to balance the gypsum sheet on his head while Pat (5'9") quickly ran in the screws to anchor it. (Gee, am I glad I had to work at the library while they were doing all of this.)

Robert had to return to his home in Mississippi after the major work was done. Pat called in two of our granddaughters from Indiana to help him paint. The living room never did get painted, but the girls painted all the bedrooms.

They found they liked small town living. They particularly liked that the swimming pool is only four blocks from the house and the branch library has computers they can use and books and videos to check out. The best part, though, was going downtown on Friday nights, eating pizza and singing Karaoke at the pizza place.