Floorboards

TJ was going to write his first blog post, but as it turns out, working on the house is taking up all of his time. When we finally come back home (to our apartment home) it's usually past our bedtime and no blogging gets done. Luckily we had a relatively early night tonight (9pm) so there's a few extra minutes of the day that can be spared! Surprisingly enough, they are my minutes - TJ is reading a book. However, it's a really good book, so I don't mind.

After a busy week of Thanksgiving dinners and the annual Teacher's Convention, we woke up early on Saturday morning as per my dad's instructions to BE THERE AT 8:30. I'll be the first to admit that we are usually the last ones at the house on the weekends. We roll in about half an hour after everyone else with our coffee and bagels and then spend another half an hour walking around drinking said coffee and eating said bagels watching everyone else work before we finally get started. We were determined to BE THERE AT 8:30.

We woke up to find this:

FROST! The second picture is of TJ scraping the front off of the windshield while I sit inside the car shivering. It was 4 degrees, so of course we felt we needed coffee and bagels. I think we made it to the house about 9:15. If I recall correctly, the line at Tim Hortons was especially long.

Now, before I really get in to this post, I have to explain something. The hardest part about being a blogger (to me, anyway) is coming up with a name for your blog. My sister Charlotte and I spent about three weeks this summer trying to think of a catchy blog title for a blog we were planning to start together. By the time we found a name, we were out of energy and never actually got around to writing anything other than a post that said "We started a blog!' Also, the word blog started to lose all meaning after saying it so many times. When starting the house blog, again, the hardest part was finding the title. I finally settled on Floorboards and Fireflies for 2 reasons: one, I like titles consisting of two nouns separated by "and", and two, I think floorboards are one of the most important parts of a house (fireflies, not so much, it just sounded good with floorboards). If you think about it, floorboards get a lot of traffic. They get worn down and beat up, and they have a ton of scratches and dents from a ton of different events and occasions. They really tell a story, so I thought it would be good to include them as a part of my title. Little did I know how much time I'd be spending with my floorboards....really up close and personal time.

Here's me and my floor. We spent a lot of time together on Saturday, seeing as the ENTIRE THING had to be taped around the edges so we could lay quarter round and then paint it without getting paint all over our newly refinished floors. Do you know how long it takes to tape up an entire house? The entire day. The entire, four degrees day. Did I mention that we have no heat at the moment? And that the floor is really cold? And I sat on it, and laid on it, and then sat on it some more? Thank goodness these pictures aren't close ups, I definitely had an icicle dripping from my nose.

Once the floors were taped, we could roll out paper to cover them up so they would stay nice and shiny while the rest of the work continued:

Hmmm. It doesn't look as nice, but it'll do.

We also had to lay yet another subfloor so we could have our kitchen/hall/guest entry/laundry room/downstairs bathroom floors ready for vinyl flooring to be installed.

Shane supervised. He did a good job, and the floors were finished pretty quickly.

At this point, Shane decided that the subfloors had too many staples, so he called TJ to see if he was interested in removing them, seeing as he is our resident staple-remover.

TJ said no. I think he ended up pulling some out in the guest entry anyway. While he was doing this we realized the floor there was pretty much useless, as were the walls. Eventually, this entire entryway will have to be redone with a new floor and a new wall (one that doesn't move when you open the door.....) but for the time being, it will get a surface makeover and our guests will just have to be careful when opening the door.

The last piece of work for the day was trying to put the fireplace back together.

No such luck.

We decided to give up for the day and go home.

Sunday consisted of priming and caulking more trim, and suspecting that something is making plans to move into our house for the winter. What makes us suspect that, you ask? Oh, I don't know....

Left: Small housewarming gift left in our laundry room. Right: Neighbour who currently lives in our chestnut tree, who we are now referring to as "Prime Suspect Number One".