Finishing the Floor

This week felt like a huge weight was lifted off our (my?) shoulders. We finished the (second) guest room floor.

When we originally measured the house and purchased the flooring we calculated each bedroom (three total), the living/front room, the kitchen, and the dining room. We then added a 10% allowance on top of that measurement to allow for broken boards and cut pieces we can't reuse . We were pretty good about using most of our scraps, so we actually have enough flooring left to also do the laundry room if we choose to. We know we'd like to do tile in the bathrooms, so that's not an option, but the remaining boxes will still go to good use, I'm sure.

That's seven+ boxes left (in the dining room, obviously that's where boxes of flooring go), with each box being 66ish sq ft, so that's about 462 sq ft.

So, the "final" (planned) room with this flooring is done!

This room was a bit more scary than the others because of the debacle with the floor leveler from two weeks ago. We had to do a TON of filling, sanding, and grinding. Ultimately, the floor actually went in pretty easily once all the prep was done.

Once the floor was in we got to work cleaning up the insane amount of dust on literally every surface in the room.

It took a while to wash everything down, including the walls; and they'll need another rinse before I'd call them clean, but we got them in much better shape and got to work on the trim.

My Padre has been telling me we need to learn to "cope" trim to reduce the amount of caulking we need to do and overall, just make the trim look nicer. I watched a couple YouTube videos and did my first coping.

You can kind of see from the video, coping means cutting away the back of the trim at an angle so that it can fit snugly against the other piece, even if the angle of the wall isn't exactly 90 degrees.

I used a coping saw (basically a really thin blade on a hand saw), and it's not perfect, but I'm excited about this new skill!

We got a few pieces of trim up before my family came over for dinner and pool time, so it'll be finished next week.

Scott also replaced all the outlets in the second guest room with the white outlets we've used throughout the house. In the process, he also added an outlet to the girls' room (the first guest bedroom) by tying into an outlet in the second guest room. The girls' room is our actual "guest room" with guest bed and all of my craft stuff. I have an old singer sewing machine table in the closet as my desk and I really needed an outlet under the desk so I could plug my sewing machine in without using an extension cord.

With all the progress this weekend we still found time to head out in the boat for a little bit. The fishing wasn't great, as far as number if fish, but Scott sure did catch a whopper:

That's a 27" red fish, to be exact.

I followed up with a smaller version, and a slightly more awkward pose 😉:

I caught a red fish too, just smaller. My fish must have been able to tell how nervous I was holding him because he just calmly sat while I held him for the photo, but he wanted no part of Scott measuring him.

Both fish made it safely back into the ocean, unharmed.

Back at home our animal encounters for the weekend didn't end: we spied all four baby burrowing owls out an about after Scott mowed.

The owls are protected in our town and there are very specific rules about how close you can get, but the rules state that the grass around them should be maintained with a mower to keep their line of sight clear.

The sod is taking root really nicely so Scott has mowed three times in the last two weeks. The owls HATE the mower, they make a terrible screeching noise if he's close, but the sighting of all four babies after he mowed tells us they were OK, hopefully thankful to be able to keep an eye out for predators.

Look at all That luscious grass where our weeds used to be 😍.

Another week in the books, and more progress made on the house! Slow and steady, but we are getting there!