Home renovations

I've been a little lax on my Blog the past couple of days... I've been renovating you know. It's true. We've been hitting it pretty hard and by the end of the day I'm wasted and just hit the recliner and in a few minutes, zzzzzzzzzzz.

What started out as a new ceiling in our living room and dining room turned into a lot more. It always does. Living in a 100 year old farm house, sometimes it's real hard to draw a line of demarcation of where you're gonna stop with the renovation that often times more resembles "search and destroy" more than anything else.

My buddy Gary came over and helped me wreck out the monstrosity of an old ceiling that someone had hung in here probably 20 years ago. That went pretty well and fairly fast thankfully, but then there was this little partition thing between the two rooms where there at one time had been a complete wall. This included a double 2x12 beam overhead that I always just assumed did something spectacular structurally, and a set of built in shelves with a built in base cabinet.

Sally said "Sure would be nice to be rid of that." And low... it came to be. The beam did nothing, not sure why it was there other than to fill a hole where the original wall was torn out. As a side trip on that removal we nearly lost half a room's worth of plaster when we pulled it out. A couple of tense moments and a big ol' plywood patch to temporarily hold that whole nitemare up there and we marched on.

Our daughter came up and painted the walls for us, getting rid of the plain ol' white that we looked at for 10 years. The color takes a bit of getting used to for me, but I like it. Sally loves it and is thrilled with it and I always say "When momma's happy... everyone is happy."

Painting the walls really made the Southern Yellow Pine floors look like crap. You probably already have the next step of this saga figured out. Called the floor guy and he came and sanded out the 2 rooms. *sigh* I'll put the finish down on them sometime this week.

Next came the process of putting up the new ceiling... this almost done us in. Martin my son in law, and I started putting 1x3's up on the ceiling to put the new ceiling on. This was Armstrong 12x12 tiles, I can't say enough bad things about this product. Don't get me wrong it looks absolutely awesome up there now. Looks like a turn of the century stamped tin ceiling, but these things are a nitemare.



There were tons of damaged tiles in the 13 cartons of these that we bought, probably averaging 15% of every box. But the worst was the way they were cut, which was "not precisely". Lots of parallelogram shaped tiles that had to be tossed out, uneven borders, you name it. On a ceiling tile like this it's real important to have 'em all line up, unlike a blank tile where it matters not so much. We fought 'em from begining to end and actually had got enough to do a bedroom with them as well. Nope, ain't gonna happen. They're gonna get returned. (along with the box and a half of crappy ones.

About a day and a half later we finally got 300 square feet of these tiles from hell up on the ceiling, and it does look awesome. I still have the crown molding to put up, and the floor finish to put down and hopefully that will give me my days and evenings back. I'm gonna build a nice Arts and Crafts style entertainment center out of Quartersawn White Oak, it'll go kinda where the ugly built shelving/cabinet was. Oughta looks awesome, but that's gonna have to wait just a bit for some paying work to take place. :-)