WARNING: Long post ahead, but this is REAL life!
In April of 2016 we had a normal evening in our home...... I ended the day with dishes and a load of laundry. At about 1:00am the hubby got up to get some water and got a little more than he bargained for. A LOT of water filling our laundry room and flooding out into the living area. In this picture (not the best angle) that door goes into said laundry room, and the floor area shown is what I am about to show you.
He hollered for me as if the house was on fire and as I sprang out of bed he was yelling at me to get towels..... I knew this was bad. Ok, so it actually didn't LOOK too bad. We cleaned it up and went back to bed. By morning this is what the floor looked like......
The water went underneath the transfer strip into the laundry room and ran from there all the way across the room to the sliding glass door. This comes just 1 year after we just had these floors installed and the ENTIRE house refinished to match. As the person that did all the grueling work, my husband tried to convince me that this wasn't that bad...... My BRAND NEW floors were ruined.... YES it is THAT bad!
I headed out of town for a blog conference the next day (perfect right?) and he was left to deal with the insurance process. He and this kids lived like this for a few days while they remove the damaged flooring and dried the sub floors out.
When I returned home, this is what living looked like. Also, I just noticed the guinea pig sitting on the arm of the chair, can you find the second one?
Ok, here is where it gets worse! The insurance adjuster comes out with a contractor to assess the damage and come up with a plan. They came up with a total of $30,000.00 to fix this. $30,000?!?!? Umm..... for floors? So we did some talking and decided to take it on ourselves and get a lot more bang for the buck. This was our baby to start with, and we felt like we could do this for the 3rd time, no problem! Well.... in the plan (the adjusters plan) we had to remove ALL of the flooring from the original home built in 1952. This was gut wrenching.
One of the things I loved about our little ranch home that we bought in 2006 was that it had all of the original hardwood floors. They decided that since we had refinished them twice since owning them they had a chance of not holding up to this job. Then came the grueling and heartbreaking labor of tearing out all of flooring we worked to hard to restore.
This right here was probably the worst part of it all...... watching this whole truck load of solid oak flooring from the 1950's be hauled off to the dump. Things were happening to fast that there was no way I had time to salvage any of it, so you can just imagine how sick I felt over it all.
Once the old and damaged flooring was removed, we got it prepped for the new installment. We used Tyvek as an underlayment vs. the old tar paper that was under there originally.
Thankfully we already owned the nailer from the previous times we had done this, so it made it easy to jump right into. I say easy, but 1,100 Sq Ft of oak flooring to install is no easy feat. This will be the last time we do this, I PROMISED my husband that.
Once the install was complete it was time to finish packing up the house so we could start the sanding.
We have three spaces in our home that are not hardwood floors..... The laundry room (the culprit of this whole mess), the bathroom and our master suite. Our room became the store all for as much stuff as possible. The majority of our stuff was boxed up into our garage & loft area and some was stored in a trailer at our shop.
We did decide to hire a flooring company to do the sanding and finishing part as it was so worth the money! The came in the day we finished packing and got everything that was left taped up and protected from the dust storm ahead.
Do you see the trend of our animals making an appearance in a lot of pictures?
House was packed up and we loaded all of our temporary belongings, kids and animals into the car and headed to my parents house. It was perfect timing (or so we thought) because they had our oldest son and our nephew on a two week trip to Europe when we had this all done.
Fast forward to their return... it still wasn't complete and there were ZERO hotel rooms in town because of the olympic trials happening at that time. Oh wait, you could get a motel6 room at the low rate of $499 per night. Thankfully my Sister worked for a company that had a block of corporate rooms at a decent hotel, so my parents stayed there and we stayed at their house. Gotta love them!
Let the sanding begin...... we would go back and check the process each night just to make sure it was moving along.
Once the sanding was complete we had to come back and pick out the stain color. We originally had Red Mahogany but I liked the new colors they brought over.
We went with coffee brown! I LOVE it!
It took about six days for the stain and all of the coats of sealer. Never realized how much hardwood flooring we had until now...... Then it was time to see the final look and move back home......
Here is where the bang for our buck came in. We saved so much money by doing most of the labor ourselves that we used that portion to continue improving our home. We installed all new doors in the original part of our home to match the addition.
We installed new sliding doors to match as well, and also planked that wall then painted it all bright white!
The entry way was given a major face lift at the same time. Why not get it all done at once right?? You can see that entire process here.
We moved everything back in like before with the addition of a few new things......
We had been waiting to get new furniture (letting the kids get as old as possible) but felt this was the perfect time in our newly refinished again home.
Although this post made it look so simple, just imagine packing up your entire house for the second time in two years, just to move out and then right back in..... I get that people move a lot, but never in and out of the same home multiple times right? Thankfully, those that do find themselves in the same boat as us can make use of crate hire London services to help them pack up their belongings efficiently when they need to move out of the property for whatever reason. It was quite the journey and really just added a few pages in our family storybook. This also led to a MAJOR DIY project hiatus on the house. We were completely wiped out. Two years later and we are back in the game, so stay tuned!
Thanks for stopping by friends, hope to see you again soon!
