Da Flo'

Wow, it has been a long time since our last post! It’s partly my fault as I just finished 10 weeks of training in Ohio to become a Civil Engineer in the Air Force. It was not as boring as it sounds, though it was difficult for me since I come from an Environmental Engineering background. It was actually educational, eye opening and fun, and I got to do some pretty cool things like this.

I left Alex with a few projects to do while I was gone. He did accomplish his honey- do list, but everything on it was a portion of bigger projects to come. I had him paint the kitchen cabinets so that when I got back we could order new counter tops and install backsplash (I got the backsplash while in Ohio.) He painted the smaller pieces of furniture in the bed room, but the larger items had to wait. He also created a bedframe from the headboard/footboard we got a while back.

So you can see we have things accomplished, but not much is show-ready yet. However, the biggest news is that we have the hardwood floors down!! Finally! The receipt for the purchase shows we bought these floors at the end of March and we now have them installed. We originally thought that we were just going to do the living room and hallway, but have since decided to add the foyer into the mix. We didn’t have enough wood to finish so we are waiting on that. While at the store we both fell so in love with the Natural hand-scraped Acacia engineered hardwood floors that it only took us a day to decided that this was the floor for us we were back the next day for the purchase. That’s a pretty fast move for us because this purchase was very permanent and pricey.

Here it is!! Our floor adventure through pictures.  

Alex took the day off work to rip up the carpet and start prepping for laying the floors down. 

I totally helped after work by removing the baseboards.

 Remember that I said our house sat empty for over a year before we bought it. Well it seems that it was used by some lizards as a place to lay their eggs. They snuck in through the dog door and I found these tiny eggs behind our baseboards. Lots of empty shells, but three were still intact. Alex is keeping them to see what hatches.

Be prepared to clean like crazy when replacing floors. I swept and swept and swept!!

"Dramatic" setting on the camera.  

Our granite tiles installed at the base of the fireplace 

The start of the floor! You can see our old textbooks being put to good use. 

Prepping the area between the kitchen and the living room. New kitchen floor (tile) to be added in the next few months. 

Sometimes a piece just would not fit so a little persuasion with a hammer was needed.

We had to work around watching Le Tour de France sometimes. 

One website said it would take 2 days to lay a hardwood floor down. So we got some coffee and worked into the night 

The cat doing what she does best.

This was about as far as we got with the coffee for the night. The website lied it took us a whole weekend and five days after work to finish. 

Laying the floor around the granite squares 

A new fan! We were in the market for a new fan since ours was original to the home and looks outdated (not to mention it didn’t work well.) We were shopping for supplies at Lowe's and just fell in love with this one. The new fan looks modern and moves tons of air, which is great for hot Florida summers.

Old Fan

New Fan

The cat has no thought for her safety! She just loved to nap on the tools 

Ripping up the foyer. 

Scrapping up the glue 

We are looking into thicker base boards so that too will be added soon. But here are the finished shots.

View from the kitchen 

View from the foyer 

View from the hallway 

The fireplace is not a finished project yet. We went out and bought all this granite for $50 (Alex calls it a Craigslist win). We are going to use a small portion of it to make a granite mosaic around the fireplace. We will certainly find other projects to make use of the rest later on.