Longing For A Living Room

While we haven't had much time to see the water or visit the beach, the Warmth part of my blog title is still very fitting. Even though it is winter, it's still comfortably warm with a cool breeze. I'm loving Florida but I do miss wobbling down the Indiana rivers and lakes in our Jon boat.

Back in June I bought a lemon tree (on the left) and lime tree (on the right) for Mi Miguel for Father's Day. The lime tree lasted about two weeks and then the leaves fell off. The lemon tree is happily thriving.

The tree is now about 4' tall and has one huge lemon on it and there are about three more that are starting to grow. It's getting so big that we finally had to drop everything and make the time to put it in a bigger container and move it outside.

November has been consumed with trying to get the living room tiled. Small bedrooms are much easier and quicker to do. The living room is over 500 sq. ft. and doing the herring bone pattern has made this project not only difficult but so time consuming. I just want a living room. Nine months with no living room has been a challenge. We haven't been able to relax or have guests because we have no place to sit. High dollar camping best describes our lifestyle these days. 

Hard work and diligence coupled with perseverance and teamwork is keeping the floor project scooting right along. Keeping the tile perfectly spaced as we placed each one onto the thinset is crucial if we want the pattern to be just as consistent at then end as it is in the beginning.

Last night even though both of us are so worn out, we dug our heels in and grouted the entire living room. Turns out I'm better at doing the actual grouting than I am at sponging up the lines. 

We toted so many buckets of clean water and dirty water back and forth that we started feeling the pain of what it must have been like to be Jack and Jill. All that's left now is for me to do the Bob Villa recommended version of cleaning the grout film off of the tile and that project will be complete.

We picked up the crown moulding from our local mill shop. I've already put both coats of paint on the moulding and the baseboards. After Thanksgiving we will start working on getting it all placed and nailed.

I started this blog so that Mi Miguel and I could keep track of our progress. We had no idea what we were getting ourselves into. But we are hellbent on doing the work ourselves. To my brave readers that dare to follow along as I archive our fixer-upper, please know that we hope you have a safe and happy Thanksgiving. 

Hopefully, my next post will be about some new boat that we just purchased and how much we love coasting along the beaches and waving at all the tourist lying around on the sand soaking up the sun. But in reality I'm pretty sure my next post will be titled something to the effect of, That Girl Still Don't Have No Boat. One way or another I will fulfill the Water part of my blog before my next entry. I'm sure of it.



 

Floor Fiasco

It's been two months since my last post. A lot has happened for us as we transitioned from the sultry summer days...

...to the Floridian's so called Fall/Autumn. Do you see the difference? Me neither.

I've certainly had a hitch in my giddy up lately with the pulled muscle in my neck. Should you ever pull this muscle, let it completely heal before you proceed with driving, lifting heavy things or moving around in general. I think it's getting better now though.

I've been a long sufferer of migraines and in the past five years I've dealt with trigeminal nerve pain. The neck injury probably hasn't helped any of that. 

The stress of trying to get the house finished and dealing with the pain has caused my blood pressure to soar through the roof. I think I finally got all that under control now and we are ready to proceed.

 We plumbed the ceiling in preparation for this huge chore, knowing that we would see this project to fruition.  We quickly learned that liquid nails wouldn't be needed if we turned the planks the other direction and worked against the trusses rather than the direction of them. And of course it always looks more attractive to look across the planks rather than along them when entering the house.

 As you can see we did a great job planking, considering we've never did anything like this before.
 

I painted an occasional plank white and then did a rubbing technique on it. The goal was to keep some of the grain showing through with this technique. I did the random scattered pieces so that when we started painting the entire ceiling, we would keep the look consistent as we went along painting and then rubbing some of the paint off.

It's completely painted. We went a little heavier on the paint than I had intended but the strain of overhead painting and working the grain through the paint started taking it's toll on both of us. But we got it done, all 570 sq. ft. of it. We will never, ever plank a ceiling again. Nor will we every paint a planked ceiling ever again.

By now my head and neck pain is incredible. I'm not a pill popper, never have been. I carry my head cocked to the side just a bit because it seems like that will allow me to naturally ease the pain. With my head tilted in this manner and the strained look I now have on my face it gives the appearance of deep contemplation. 

It was the start of the second week of October when we fell into "The Living Room Tile Hell Hole"  It wasn't intentional. We thought we had everything all picked out. We even hauled all  $1700 worth of it home ourselves. Those nice big 24x24 square porcelain tiles would cover the area quickly and we'd be done with it. The color was too muted for me but we couldn't find the color I had in my head so we just went with it and  pressed on. 

By doing a dry run of laying out some of the tiles, Mi Miguel realized that with tiles that big we definitely had to level the concrete. "How do you do that?" I stupidly asked. His reply, "You just buy bags of concrete and mix it in a bucket with water and pour it on the floor." 

"It levels itself." He said. I tried to envision this but I wasn't seeing it. I figured as long as Mi Miguel had it in his head how all that works, then it was good enough for me.

By now the head and neck pain has me in a brain fog. We never dreamed it would be so difficult to level out concrete in a living room and dining room. How hard can it be? I'm a very determined kind of girl that never balks at hard work. Mi Miguel said,  "It will take about ten 50 pound bags." Looking at the daunting task that loomed before us, I tried to straighten my head between my shoulders as much as I could and I said, "Let's do it!" 

Mi Miguel diligently and confidently worked the concrete onto the floor.

I just couldn't see how this was going to level itself out. But I had great faith in my wonderful husband and I trusted his decision on how we were to do this. 

He mixed and poured the ten bags over the floor like it wasn't anybody's business and then we both went to bed. and then we woke up the next morning to what looked like giant concrete pancake puddles. This is the point with my head bent still bent,  where I started incoherently mumbling something like, "Please dear God, get me out of here."

It was at this point that I started drawing sketches of birds. Or wait, maybe I watched birds, that's it. I started taking up bird watching. Oh no, no, no, now wait, I think I thought I was a bird. Yeah, that's it. I thought I was a bird and I wanted to fly away because as Nelly would say, "I don't know where my home is." No, no, no,  now I remember, I started sketching birds and singing the lines that I could remember from Nelly Furtado's, I'm Like a Bird, that's what happened. And then I think Mi Miguel and I fell into an abyss which is much different than a hell hole. When you fall into a hell hole no one notices. But when you drop into a fixer-upper home abyss, other people can see it and hear it. You don't think that they do, But they do.

Here's evidence, after a few days of wallowing around in this fixer-upper abyss neither Mi Miguel nor I were able to talk in any normal tone to each other. A few days after that we weren't able to speak to each other at all. This is when when we learned that people can see a couple fall into the fixer-upper abyss. I know because it was at this time that our sweet neighbor started dropping brochures on our doorstep of great places to visit in Florida, like this one for Kennedy Space Center, where we could clear our minds and think about intelligent things.

And this one for the Magic Kingdom at Disney World in Orlando where we wouldn't have to think about anything at all.

And this one, so that we could escape from our tile hell hole and our fixer-upper abyss and run to the Everglades.

 And then he said he gave us this one. He asked us if we saw it on our doorstep. We said we hadn't seen it. He shrugged his shoulders and said the wind must have carried it off.  But I think he must have reconsidered and retrieved it before we had a chance to collect it off of our doorstep. I think he knows us well enough now to know what a frightful mess we are with working on this house. Perhaps Mi Miguel and I on a boat in the middle of nowhere, probably wouldn't be a good idea. 

Realizing what a great house we have and how truly blessed we are to have such wonderful neighbors. We finally got our wits about us and researched how to properly level a floor. We decided we were capable of doing this ourselves...yet again (calling a professional floor leveler would be too easy you see).  

And so we did. I stirred all forty bags of concrete one bucket at a time by hand until it was thoroughly mixed and then Mi Miguel used the drill to make sure each bucket was well blended.

We got our scrap 2x4's from the shed and started marking off our first section. After four hours it dried, we did the next section and so forth until we had all eleven sections completed. After about 40 bags (not ten) of concrete our leveling project was finished.  All in all we have about 50 bags of this self leveling concrete on our floor if you count the concrete pancakes. Somewhere during this leveling process I grew an unshakable disdain for the huge too beige 24x24 tiling that we had bought. So After pouring a section of concrete we would load the truck with a batch of the tile and return it. The concrete leveling and returning the heavy tile was a nightmare.

Once the arduous chore of leveling the concrete was over, we started searching high and low for a flooring store. Lowes and Home Depot were out of the question. We knew every tile on every shelf and even the employees by name. With a list of about eight stores in hand, we grabbed our GPS, loaded the last batch of 24x24's to be returned and we were off. We searched high and low and finally came up with the perfect tile.

Not only did we find the perfect tile planks but it ended up being $800 less than the huge tiling that we returned. I absolutely love it for what we are wanting to do with the living room and dining room. As you can see Mi Miguel has already started placing it on the bare floor just to get the edges pre-cut and ready to go. When we were in the store and decided we wanted it, I think Mi Miguel thought it would be simple to install. Once we got home with it, I just knew it would look amazing if we laid it out herringbone style. He had to agree once he saw me laying out the pattern. This is where we are at now. It's the middle of November. It took us two months and an incredible amount of hard work to achieve this floor. Now we have to pick all that preliminary tiling up and start putting down the thin set and making this floor a reality. 

After many, many days of hard work, this evening we decided to do nothing at all. I'm having a glass of my port with a bark of 85% cacao chocolate. Mi Miguel is having a beer with nothing at all. Just a really cold Boston Lager ale. Ahhh! Yep, this evening it's time to relax for tomorrow we start the grueling task of actually laying the planks.