Third Coat is a Charm

After 51.75 hours of carrying, scraping, sanding, and painting (each), the floors are complete! The polyurethane took three days to dry, so that gave us time to focus on other things, such as moving out of the Siletz house. The wait was well worth it!
I am so proud of them! There are plenty of imperfections, but it all leads to greater character (or that is what I am going with).

As you can see from this hallway shot, we decided to completely ignore the spare bedroom. That
is going to have to be a whole other project. The floor is in great shape in there, so it shouldn't be as hard as the living room (no linoleum!).

So shiny and clean!! It is a new start for this for this 80 year old house!

The whole project cost $251.31, which includes dump fees for the old carpet, safety supplies, paint remover, sander rental, TONS of sand paper, polyurethane, and painting supplies. I can't even imagine how much it would have cost if we would have paid someone to do it, so I am pretty happy with us. :) I hadn't really done a project like this before, so I learned sooooo much, and had a sore back for multiple days in a row! It was so good for me, and I think Jered had fun too.

There is still a ton of stuff to do, but one project is off the list......bring it on!!

Edging and finishing

These last two days we have been working on getting the paint off the edges. We have used scrapers, sanders and paint remover, and finally it was starting to come around! Some of the brown paint was really hard to get off! The blue paint had to have been the easiest, and in between was the pink paint, where in some spots it seemed to have sunk to the inside of the wood. It was a very tedious job, but it is worth it, as you can see below.
There was a lot of remaining black glue around the fireplace, but after a lot of scraping and sanding, there was just a little brown paint up in the corner that remained.

Looks great as a whole though!

Now for the polyurethane. We put our first coat on Thursday night. We did a section of the bedroom (we plan to carpet the rest) and the whole front room.

I really like how dark it turned out.

I am excited to see how dark it will be once it is dry. We plan on putting at least two more coats on the floors before we call it quits. I am so proud of what we can accomplish together, and can't wait to share it.

Wood

By Saturday afternoon, we had most of the linoleum off the floors. You can see the spots that really held on though.
An hour later, they were gone.

Daisy finally got to come inside again once we were pretty sure that we had removed all of the staples and nails. We did find quite a few more, but Daisy's paws are okay.

We started again Sunday morning.

This is the beginning of the sanding. We used really chunky sandpaper to start off with. Beneath the glue/black tar stuff, there was pink, blue, and brown paint.

An hour later, it looks even better!

Two hours later, it looks a lot better! Still a lot of the black stuff in the lower boards though. We used a scraper to get some of it off, but the sander worked out well too.

Two and a half hours later, and I am getting really excited (and tired). The sander doesn't get close to the edges, so we are going to have to do that later, but it sure did work good on the main part.

Four hours and fifteen minutes later the floor looks like this! It is just beautiful (except for the edges still).

Meet Holly!!

After almost two months of anticipation, I am proud to show off Holly, our new house! The keys were presented to us on Wednesday, the we spent the next two evenings exploring the place.

The living room has two layers of carpet, padding and a layer of linoleum glued down to the wood floors.

This is Jered scraping off the purple linoleum. It came off pretty good in most spots, but some places were glued on very well!

This is the spare bedroom. The carpet had been mostly pieced together, so it was quite easy to remove. The dark wood underneath is just beautiful!!

But there were more than a few imperfections as well.

Daisy doesn't know what to think. She is pretty nervous walking around and such, but I am sure she will settle down, once we settle down....

This is going to be our bedroom. This carpet came up the easiest.

That was two layers of carpet and padding, it was friggen heavy! We ended up unrolling it and cutting it in half just to get it into the truck.

Last, but for sure not least, was the linoleum. I took this picture because Jered had a big piece starting to rip. That happened a few times, but what I will really remember is the little pieces that just refused to let go.

Frick! Another thing I will remember will be uncovering this bright piece of wood. It was quite an eye sore compared to the rest of the room (spare room).

Here more than half of the linoleum is up. There is a pile of wall paper (it was underneath the carpet in our bedroom along with some newspaper from April 25th, 1965) and such that we are going to save for when we paint. There was still a lot of glue left from the linoleum, with beautiful wood peaking through the cracks.

There is still a lot of work ahead, but it sure is exciting. Stay tuned!!

Our house to Olalla!

Yesterday we hiked from our house to Olalla Reservoir. It was a wonderful hike, and amazingly did not rain on us at all.

We have attempted this hike multiple times throughout our stay in Siletz, but the last house just before you would cross the logging gate has about one million dogs, and they all come running at you before you can cross the gate. So we neglected to attempt to cross the gate with Daisy (tried only once, and it was not good!) and left her home to watch the house. We made it across the gate this day with four or five dogs closely watching us, along with the giant Rottweiler growling at us every other step of the way (not on leash, so you can imagine how scary this is). The dogs aren't terrible, but I am sure it keeps most people from crossing the gate (the dogs deterred us at least three other times!) We made it past the dogs, which was our biggest hurdle, and off we went!

I would like to hike up this road someday, today just wasn't the day.

With a quick super steep down hill right at the end, we made it to the lake looks like it had filled up somewhat since the last time we had been there, but still a stump forest.

A Great Blue Heron is sitting right atop of the snag in the middle of the picture. So beautiful! We decided to go around the lake and connect to the power lines we could see and follow them back to our house. Then we would make more of a loop than an up and back for our hike.

There sure wasn't much of a trail on this side of the lake! (The other side of this reservoir is very developed)

We made it to the power lines and started back to our house. It sure wasn't a long hike; the drive from the house would have been around 10 miles, but I think our hike was maybe 3 at the most!

The power line trail was very steep! Although heart pounding, it made for a beautiful view once I was at the top. Even a glimpse of the lake!

This snail didn't make it up the hill, or maybe it was just resting.......

What a great hike!!!

Second Day of the Year

After noticing that NOAA had issued four weather warnings regarding the astronomically high tides that we were having, we decided we couldn't miss the opportunity to check it out.

Needless to say, it was quite disappointing. The most entertainment came from these young boys that were playing on a log in the surf. They obviously don't know that two inches of water can move a five ton log!!

The kids got away in time, but that water isn't very deep anyway. Nye Beach turn around would be a great place to watch big waves, if they were there. Watch for big waves another time.

A quick drive out to Yaquina Head showed bigger waves, but still, barely anything to snap a camera at. So we left the beach and headed back to the country.

These look like old railroad tracks as we drove along the bay road.