Learn From My Fail: the Distance Between

I guess this is a milestone, the sharing of our first SLA LFMF.

The front door is a half-inch too low to not scrape against the entryway tile as it opens and closes! It never occurred to me to consider the distance between the subfloor and the bottom of the front door when choosing flooring.

Now it is too late to switch to a thinner, resilient flooring. Most of the tile is already glued down.

What choice do we have now but to get our front door raised? The door itself is metal with foam core, so we cannot shave it shorter, to allow it to pass over the tile. Perhaps buying a wood door to shave down would be the cheaper option...if one of us took the time off work today to shop for a wood door.

Tom the husband is going over this morning to see the situation for himself. Our contractor says lifting the door should take half a day of work.

More as the story unfolds.

THE UNFOLDING: It turned out that it was not so great a problem as I feared. The workmen lifted the door, and also leveled it, using shims underneath. Turns out the door had not been made level when it was installed. But it is all fixed now.

And who am I kidding? Half this blog is LFMFs.

Upstairs Floors

This is what we found under the bedroom carpet upstairs. Hardwood in rough shape.





About 15 years ago, the house was treated for termites. We do not know if this is old damage from before the treatment, or newer damage since then. The carpet padding was laid over it long enough to stain the wood, so maybe it dates from 15 years ago? I'll keep an eagle eye out for signs of termites when the weather warms.

The plan is to sand, repair, and refinish these floors, staining them to match the new hardwood living room flooring.

Wallpaper and Flooring

I thought I had a putty knife in the car when I went to scrape the backing off the entryway walls. Alas, I was mistaken. However, I discovered that the car's ice scrapers work well.



Now I just need a final wipedown to remove any gluey residue and I'm ready to patch the rough spots.

Tom and I spent the last bit of New Year's weekend testing two different makes of floor tile. Both are porcelain and mimic the look of natural stone, but they are from different manufacturers and have different colors.

(Great googly moogly, boxes of tiles are heavy! Remember to lift with your legs, folks! And don't be afraid to use several shopping carts at once-- I may have broken out the sides of the single shopping cart I used. )

Because we did not have enough of each make of tile to totally cover all the to-be-tiled area, we laid out all we had of one make, photographed it, then moved it to another area. It took a long time, and as the sun moved through the sky the lighting changed. So the comparison isn't perfectly equal from one make to the other...but it will have to be close enough.





It is so hard to decide which to go with! They are both beautiful, and cost the same.





I'll pick one, then the next day change my mind! Argh!





In other news, our favored contractor for the flooring is very slow getting back to us with estimates. But he says he can start January 9 and finish quickly, so I keep leaving him voice mail. I wonder if he doesn't really want our work, or maybe he's just crazy-busy.

Selecting Floor Tile for the Entryway and Kitchen: Suggestions?

I don't aim to decorate my mid-century home with period-style furnishings, but I do want to keep the features of this house consistent with the time and spirit in which it was built.

Originally, the entryway and kitchen had some kind of speckled, multicolored resilient sheet flooring, which we discovered when we removed the pink, wall-to-wall living room carpet. Doesn't it look festive?

I love the idea of a durable, nonporous, easy-to-clean floor in these areas. I'd settle for a new layer of sheet vinyl, but Tom feels strongly that it should be some kind of ceramic tile. I have asked him several times about just how strongly he feels about vinyl vs tile, and he is unmoving.

I must confess I am not inflexible on this; I dig ceramic tile. Also, this decision needs to be made quickly, if the work is to be done and we are to move in before the end of January.

However, I still want to restore, not "remuddle". I am hoping to find a ceramic tile usage consistent to the era, but the retro research I've done so far only shows ceramic tile in bathrooms. Was it ever used in other parts of the house? Would it be anachronistic to do so?

To-Do List

House Systems

• Get the sewer main cleared. The high-pressure water-blasting device freezes if the weather is too cold, so the service call was rescheduled for a few days later, when we are expecting warmer temperatures. Then the plumber can run the camera down the line and see just how damaged it is, and we can decide what to do about it. Maybe replace the line, maybe just pour root-killer in every so often. We shall see.
• Fix deadbolt on door to deck (even though the current security brace is kind of interesting to look at).
• Replace existing vintage (programmable?) thermostat with new programmable one. I think the old one has character, but I can't find instructions for it, and the hubby does not trust it, so away it goes.
  
  
  
  
• Put a filter in the HVAC system. The mildew remediators said they went to remove the old one and found there wasn't one at all.

Appliances

• Buy a refrigerator. There currently isn't one.
• Trade dishwashers between current house and new house.

Flooring

• Installation of unfinished hardwood flooring in living room. Will be red oak 1/4" x 2 1/4" to match that on the stairs up, and in the upstairs hallway and bedrooms. Have not yet decided on finish. Am consulting a post on Retro Renovation: "What color stain to use for mid-century oak flooring?"
• Refinishing of stairs and hallway, repair and refinishing of hardwood flooring in bedrooms. At least one plank is termite-burrowed, and the other room has a poorly-putty-filled hole.
• Do we want a carpet runner on the stairs? Here is one way to do it, again from Retro Renovation: "Carpet runner for the oak stairs"
• Installation of ceramic/porcelain tile in entryway, probably over the original vinyl/linoleum flooring (I feel like we should keep it, buried in the precambrian layer, as a record of what originally was there).
• Replacement of tile flooring in kitchen, to match that in the entryway. Even though the kitchen floor is functional, as long as the workmen are there, it makes sense to do this now.

One of the bidding contractors (the only one I thought to ask, duuuh) said he could start January 9 and the project would take about four weeks. Which means we wouldn't be able to move in until February. How frustrating...I want to have my tiki-themed housewarming party now! *pouts and stomps feet*

Status Report

Sewer main is somewhat unclogged. We can now flush the toilet without water backing up in the basement, but the pipe was too clogged to allow the camera to go more than 20 feet from the cleanout. The plumber advised we go easy on the toilet paper, at least until his return December 28 to scour out the sewer main using high-pressure water. Then we can try the camera again and see if the sewer line is damaged and if so how badly.

We have three guys giving us cost estimates for installing living room flooring and repairing (termite damage) and refinishing the bedroom floors. Should have all the estimates by the end of Monday.

Mildew remediation completed. Spore density test came back much much lower. What a relief.

I need better photos for this blog, if I'm going to ask people to look at it and advise me.

The Living Room Flooring

When we bought the house, the living room had pinkish wall-to-wall carpet and heavy pinch-pleated curtains under a heavy valance to match. During the mildew remediation, we discarded all the pink textiles. After it was gone, even with only plywood subfloor under our feet, the room looked ten times better.

Underneath the pink carpet, in a path leading from the front door to the kitchen, we found some kind of sheet flooring. Probably put there to withstand the most heavily trafficked area of the house. It looks like it may have had a colorful confetti-esque design which faded from age.

I have begun to remove the pink floral wallpaper from the entryway walls. The vinyl top layer stripped off pretty easily, but the fuzzy backing is still waiting for me to get back to it.

A neat thing about the coat closet is the switch in the doorframe to automatically turn on the light when you open the door.

The Kitchen

Sometime in this house's history (possibly the 1980s), the kitchen was redecorated. The original multicolored linoleum flooring was buried under white ceramic tile, the backsplash became white tile with blue Delft-style accents, and the countertops became blue-gray laminate. No idea what the original sink was like.

Scheirich Kitchens medallion, under the sink

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However, the kitchen cabinets seem to be original. They are battered but well-made and still solid. Here is what they looked like on a manufacturer's postcard (image from the blog Viewliner Ltd.).



In one of the base cabinets, I found a wooden cutting board stored in a bracket mounted underneath the drawer. The cutting board itself would have been very attractive, if it had not been for the impressive crop of grey mildew growing on both sides.

The fuzzy cutting board

Mounted on a wall cabinet by the sink, there is an odd little metal thingy. It seems to be some kind of hinge, maybe a base for a swinging arm? What could it have been used for?

What is this mysterious doodad?

A hole has been cut in the blind corner cabinet to accommodate a dishwasher.