Thursday, August 16, 2012

For the Love of Flooring





It's an age-old dilemma.  Even the cave-folk of yestercentury struggled with it, I'm sure.  Go with the lush shag carpet or the timeless hardwood flooring?

Before we begin, let's consult an expert.  When I first met my husband he was working as a carpet cleaner.  When he quit, as an inexpensive form of therapy, he wrote this:

Lessons I Learned as a Carpet Cleaner:

  • Your dog is more destructive to your house than you will admit.
  • Your cat is worse.
  • Yes, the offered protector (Scotchguard, etc.) helps- if you clean your carpet at least once a year. 
  • Please vacuum before your carpet cleaner shows up.
  • A good carpet cleaner can remove food-based red dye, wax, blood, tar, and most rust.  There is nothing he can do about wood stain, bleach, ink, or burns.
  • 90% of renters expect their full security deposit to be refunded.
  • 30% deserve it.
  • 70% will intentionally deceive their landlord to get it.
  • Shag carpet with a deep pile is nearly impossible to keep clean, and will wear out faster than others.
  • The deeper the pile of the carpet, the more likely it is that I will find coins and goldfish crackers in your carpet.
  • The dirtiest, most worn out carpet in your living room is where you put your feet in front of your couch or easy chair.
  • Re-arrange your furniture frequently.
  •   If you don’t want me to clean a room, that’s fine.  Just don’t say, “No one ever goes in there.”  Yes they do.
  •  Carpet does not belong in high traffic areas (halls and entryways.)
  •  Kitchens and bathrooms should have carpet....NEVER.  Do you really want what goes on in these two rooms to stick around under your feet forever? 
  • If you want me to clean human waste, please just tell me it’s from your pet.
Our floor is one of the few things about our house that is still original.  It's a light-colored pine that tints orange in some lighting.  It gets scratched and dented very easily, as was shown in this post.  It was covered by carpet for decades, probably during the carpet epidemic of the 1950's.  Wall-to-wall carpet throughout, really people?


This is a photo of a different old house that Jonathan visited.  This is what we imagine our floor looked like at one time.  When we moved in, the carpets had already been taken out and the original floor refinished (thank goodness.)  It was one of the first things we loved about the house.

As with many old houses the floor has a lot of curves.  The kitchen cabinets were actually cut to fit the curve of the floor!  When my daughter rolls a ball across the kitchen it goes all different directions before it settles in the same spot every time. 

As our addition gets closer, our anxiety over the flooring is increasing.  We don't know what to do.

Hardwood is beautiful and is all the rage in modern housing.  It is so much easier to keep clean than carpet!  I clean my floors every other day and am always amazed at how much disgusting filth accumulates in two days' time.  I can't imagine how gross it would be if I had carpet everywhere and this nastiness were hidden in the fibers.
Two days worth of floor mess... and do I really lose that much hair?
The downside, however, is not being able to get down and play with our kids on a wooden floor.  Believe me, we tried.  For the first year after we moved in we had nothing but hardwood.  It was so uncomfortable.  We finally broke down and purchased an area rug on clearance at the good ol' Home Depot.  We suddenly felt like we had a living room!  When my daughter walked in for the first time she wouldn't stop sitting on it and rubbing it with her hands.

Before

After

We've concluded that the recipe for a perfect floor is to use both.  We'll put hardwood in our high-traffic or messy rooms such as entryways, hallways, kitchens, and bathrooms.  We are hoping to find wood that matches the original floor, but a little more durable.

Bedrooms will be carpet, but we're considering hardwood with a padded carpet rug in the middle.  Then when the carpet wears out we can just throw it away and buy a newer, more updated style of rug without having to call the install guys.  We love install guys, don't get me wrong.  But every time we call them all we hear is "old house...lead poisoning...death and destruction...pay us more money..."  Thank goodness I have a husband who doesn't mind lead poisoning and can install most things.

And when we're buying padding for carpet, we won't skimp.  It means the difference between walking on pure happiness or torturous misery.  Our feet will thank us.

No matter what type of flooring we put in, we know it will get messy.  Our main goal is to get the mess back out again.  And if we do decide to hire professional carpet cleaners we'll be sure to vacuum before they come.



Sunday, August 12, 2012

Pest Control

I've always hated bugs and snakes.  HATED.  My mom was the same way, so naturally I blame her for my fears.  Growing up, I have so many horror stories that only fueled the fire.  A wasp flying up my shirt and getting trapped, spiders in the basement showing up out of nowhere, and ants on the living room carpet. 

I used to check out bug books from the library and pour over every detail so I knew what I was up against.  And of course, one hears such facts as to make one's skin crawl.  For example, did you know there are easily over 10,000 spiders per acre in the US?  That humans swallow more than a cup of spiders each year?  Killer bees are migrating toward us at this very moment?  Recalling them now, I realize that most of these are exaggerations or flat-out lies (I blame my brother for these ones...)  True or not, they still contributed to my negative feelings about pests. 

As an adult, you would expect a little bit of maturity to develop.  A fear of practically harmless creatures is irrational, right?  I don't care.  If it crawls, creeps, stings, or slithers, I don't want to have anything to do with it!  The day I learned that you could actually pay someone to spray for bugs I began to hope for a brighter future.  I vowed to never live with a bug problem again.

Then we bought our lovely little cottage with the pond view.  In a rural town.  Across the street from a picturesque field

Seriously, what was I thinking?! 
This "little" guy made himself at home in our backyard.  I made my husband torch him.

I was getting ready for church one morning while my daughter played on the floor.  I turned to check on her only to find a hairy brown monstrosity crawling across her face.  I think I may have scared her just a little bit with my screaming...I did my best to get it off her without hitting her.

I was playing outside with my kids when my daughter kindly informed me I had a spider on my shoulder. 
 
I was putting on my shoes by the back door when a snake slithered out of the wall and across the room. 

And that's just the beginning.  I began to feel like I couldn't handle it!  Money has been tight this summer so we went without spraying for bugs until the end of July.  It was awful!  When we finally broke down and sprayed it was like a spider exodus.  They came out of nooks in the house I didn't even know we had. 

The worst was when I was headed outside and there was a black widow on the glass door.  I killed it immediately, of course!  The problem now is that no one believes me.  I would have taken a picture, if I wasn't sure it was going to GET me.  Although I do have the smudge from its nasty body to prove it!

Doesn't that look like a black widow's guts?  That's what I thought.

Today I nearly died.  I was picking blackberries with my daughter and feeling like a good little mommy.  Quality time, right?  I struggle with the blackberry bushes because they're frequented by the aforementioned critters.  Wasps, dragonflies, bees, spiders, box elder bugs, cats (?)... I was congratulating myself on being brave and picking berries when I happened to look down.  That's right.  I saw this:

That's its head AND body.  Let me know when you see it.
Ummmm...yeah.  I started screaming.  I yelled for my fearless husband to get outside, fast.  I pulled my daughter back from the berries and kept an eye on the offensive beast.  If there's one thing I've learned about scary things, it's that you never take your eyes off them.  If they get away, you won't sleep again...ever.  I can't handle wondering where they went.

My husband donned some gloves (at my insistence) and took the snake over to the duck pond. 
Tell me you wouldn't put your house up for sale after that.  After we bought the house we kept hearing that it was infamous for having a lot of snakes.  We are hoping that our cats help us out with that.  C'mon kitties. 

With all of these miserable stories in only two years of living here, I shudder to think what we have coming.  Needless to say, we'll be spraying for bugs again soon.

Wednesday, August 8, 2012

Addition Blueprints

East side

West side

North side


The blueprints are done!  This is what our house will look like when we're finished. We couldn't be more thrilled with the plans! 

We had Brent Windley as our architect.  He was amazing.  Jonathan was saying he used to be a professor of architecture at Utah State University but has since retired.  Now he just does extra jobs on the side.  We LOVED working with him.  He surprised us by how fast he got everything done!  He also had a great sense of humor, which really helped when he had to listen to our crazy ideas of what we wanted.

We began our planning with a few goals in mind:
  1. We didn't want the addition to stand out from the rest of the house.  When we first started studying additions to old houses we noticed that many of the new sections didn't match the original house.  We could identify the exact decade the addition was, well, added.  While it would be obvious that our addition wasn't original, we wanted to keep the house as period-looking as possible.  Because of this, vinyl siding is out. =(  This also meant that we couldn't build two stories, we had to stick to a story and a half.
  2. We want more kids, therefore, we need more bedrooms.  We needed to get as many rooms and bathrooms as we could without going over budget.  
  3. We needed STORAGE. Before Walmart was invented, people didn't accumulate stuff. Decorations, clothing, childhood toys, scrapbooks, DVDs, games, etc.  It all begins to take up space.  The pioneers who built our house didn't take our hoarding ways into consideration.  We need a lot of closets and attic space.
With these understandings clarified, we began to plan.  As I said before, our architect was very patient.  He took time to explain why we couldn't have a lot of the things we wanted because structurally, they simply wouldn't work.

After our first meeting with Brent, I broke down and cried to my husband.  The plans we saw were so different from what we wanted!  I felt like we had space in all the wrong places and not enough light and air where we wanted it.  Thank goodness for Plan B.  It was so much better!

It is time to get the metaphorical ball rolling!