Storm Damage

Pics of the storm damage from last night. Luckily none of our trees were too badly damaged and the house is fine. The surrounding trees, however, didn't fair so well. One huge pine tree fell right at the entrance to the alley that accesses this house and about 4 others and the alley is completely blocked. No one is getting cars in or out for a while. Power lines are also tangled in all the tree wreckage. (excuse the quality; phone pics)

The turn around/driveway behind the house

Turn around

Backyard

Pine tree blocking the drive. View from behind the house.

Pine tree blocking the drive. View from street.

Entryway Flooring

While we were sanding the kitchen floor we also decided to go ahead and do the entryway floor. The goal is to have all the wood floors be at least close to the same color throughout. It has now been stained a nice mahogany to match the kitchen floor. It needs several coats of polyurethane and then it will be all done!

Freshly sanded and stained 'After'

And here is the 'Before' color

 

New Kitchen Sink

The old kitchen sink is out, the new one is in. And now centered under the window to boot! Now the dish washer needs to go in and all the plumbing needs reconfigured and hooked up. The back splash will be that sampling of white tile to the left of the window.

The kitchen also came with a nice butcher block (on the far right of the counter) that needs refinished.

Good As New Kitchen Floor

After 5 layers of carpeting and tile, scraping, staple-pulling, sanding, staining and finishing...the kitchen floor is done! And it is gorgeous! Mahogany stain, original oak flooring from 1836.

Not bad for a floor that looked like this 2 weeks ago:

And this 4 months ago:

Window Washing

Jarrod washing windows

It is absolutely shocking the difference clean windows has made in the light! It's night and day.

Adventures in Industrial Sanding

The kitchen floor has now been stripped down to the original wood. But since it was coated in glue and paper from an old tiling job that had been down for who knows how many decades (or centuries!) there was no question we needed to do some heavy duty sanding. 

Before

So we rented this guy:

And as you can see, the floor looks a hundred times better!

As you would expect, there was a terrible amount of dust so we did a lot to try and cut down the filth in the cabinets and the rest of the house.

The only issue was that the sander doesn't reach all the way into the corners and along the perimeter so we bought a belt sander to do the edges.
And since we had the sander for the weekend, we went ahead and did the entryway as well. It had a very dated orangey finish to it that is going to be stained darker to match all the other wood floors.