Le Cotage Conversion- All Hands On Deck! Part I

Our next biggest challenge since that bathroom episode downstairs, was refinishing the floor.This is the original floor, so it's 77 years old.

I had a trip planned to the temple with a bunch of friends on Saturday, but early in the morning, I ran up to Alpine which is 35 minutes north to pick up a floor sander. I came home, dropped the car at the cottage and started saying goodbye to my hubby.

"What's wrong?" I asked. "That's not what I was expecting it to be." he answered. Well, I hated to leave him to fend for himself but I had to skedaddle!

When I came home that evening they had a different sander- the one you see up above. The first one rotated and didn't have a collection bag. It was apparently a bad scene.

On Monday, Jake, Rylee, and Anthony spent hours sanding. On Tuesday, I took over dancing with the sander. Here, you can see Nicole and Porter scraping the bedroom to get it ready to sand.

After four hours, Jake walked in to check on me and I was laying flat on the floor resting. I always feel guilty when he finds me doing nothing. "I literally just barely laid down!" I exclaimed in defense.

It was very dusty. We had a dust collector from the woodshop set up to filter the air. It felt pointless, what I was doing. I would watch for "progress". The finish would gum up on the sanding pad creating stone-like lumps which would cause the whole thing to "float" instead of sand. I would have to stop often to scrape these off.

As you can see here, there were these very strange dents in the floor. They became more pronounced as the floor around them was sanded down. My guess is that these were caused by furniture being pushed around. It is not a hard-wood. The living room half is hemlock, and the kitchen half is douglas fir.The problem is, any spots that are still covered by the old finish will not absorb the stain or the new finish.

This particular section of flooring that Rylee is working on was in the closet of the bedroom which use to occupy what will be our kitchen. The closet contained actual linoleum which had to be scraped up to reveal the wood underneath.

There were places in the floor which had plywood scabbed in because there were vent registers and who knows what else. Jake removed the plywood and took wood flooring from the original kitchen to patch these areas up. He also took some flooring which was nailed up to create walls around the storage room downstairs. That's why these particular boards are blue. 

Eventually, I suggested to Jake that we had to come up with something different. I felt like I was just wasting my life away.  We suspect that there was years of wax layered on this floor. It is imbedded into the wood itself. Jake was even concerned the the wood wouldn't absorb the stain like normal because of this.

I enlisted the children with all the hand-sanders they had at the woodshop. Here is my Morgan.

He persisted and got quite a patch of bare wood. (Not shown here) He revealed probably 2 square feet with that sander, which was not easy!

It was kind of fun doing dance moves with the sander, but after two days of this every muscle I owned hurt.



So... (I can hear you asking) what did we come up with to speed this up?

Le Cotage Conversion- Painting Party

 Being the fabulous parents that we are, we let the children do some painting. Ha. Actually, it was all Jake's idea because I have a hard time handing over this type of thing to people who are not detail-oriented and careful. I am a homeschooling parent, however, and how could I deny them this opportunity? As Jake's grandpa Irvin used to say:

"We're not raising cows, we're raising boys!"

So, using that logic here I go:

"We're not painting walls, we're painting kids!"

 Check out that floor...

Morgan seems to be good at any task we assign him. We don't have to check on him. If he needs something he gets it. He doesn't whine or complain. 

 Do it with FLAIR!

 Don't worry. The colors aren't as bold as they seem. I'm just taking pics with my phone. Plus, when we get all the natural wood trim in they won't seem so bold.

 He just goes!

With five children and two adults (where in the heck was Anthony!), this job was done in under two hours. Amazing, right?

Any bare spots will be covered by cabinets.

Pretty much that whole entire wall will be cabinets. (I am married to a cabinet-maker!)

 Texturing my bedroom! I made those corners by myself!Am I using too many exclamation points!?

I'm going to have so much fun decorating my new room.

 Guess what's behind curtain #1? 



A certain someone is spraying primer in a certain room...

 See that hideous looking green in the laundry room? I'm not finished in there. It will look nice when I'm through.

 This is what's known as an airless paint sprayer. It is quite noisy.

 Texture!

 I love it!

 These are just some odd pictures I took while waiting for Jake to finish spraying.

One day, I am informed that, "We need to make sure these labels don't get thrown away." A man handles this by throwing the labels on the floor of a construction site. A woman handles it by taping them to each other, labeling them with the word "keep", and taping them to the wall.

Le Cotage Conversion- Stomping el Techo

Here's your chance to see some of Porter's facial expressions.

This is called stomping the ceiling. I did not try it but it is a hard task. The movement of pushing "up" is very challenging for me. I guess because it's not something I do very often.
We chose this texture because it does the best job of camouflaging the unevenness of the ceiling. That just wasn't something we wanted to take on.

Here is the cottage cozily nestled in snow.

Le Cotage Conversion-Plaster Surgery

 Let's go back for a quick minute so you can see the way the original walls in the living room were plastered. This is a coved ceiling, referring to the way it curves.

Above is a picture I took before we ever started working.

This picture shows the coving a little better. Jake and I just took a look through all the photos since the beginning and we have done SO MUCH WORK!

After we worked like dogs to remove the coving, this ugly mess is what we were left with on the ceiling.

Here is my beautiful work filling in the space with mud.

This is just to show the walls after they've been taped and had the first coat of mud put on. Which, I also did! *So proud* So, this is pre-texture. I've gone from doing menial labor to tape-n-first coat of mud. Then, there's a final skim coat and then texturing, but I'm not skilled enough for that.

When we're helping... (can you see little Harris at the middle of the sheet of dry-wall)

...we're happy, and we sing as we go! On the left you can see a stack of boxes of dry-wall mud. We used SO much mud in this main area that the humidity was worse than Guam! The doors and windows and people were all sweating.

Here is the texture! I know, it's weird looking.

Laundry room ready for paint! Actually... no, it's not. We have to stomp the ceiling. That'll be the next post!

Le Cotage Conversion- Where did we go?

You guys probably figured that I'd given up completely on the blog and you'd never get to see any more of the Cottage.

Don't worry. I'll keep you up to date. I just didn't want to bore you with more pictures of dry-wall and really what can I say about the building of walls? Well, actually I could say a lot but I won't right now!

Here is a sneak-peak of the downstairs bathroom.

Now, I'm going to the gym.