Reclaimed wood flooring

I am in love with our flooring.  We absolutely hare carpeting, so we knew we would be putting down hardwood floors.  We weren't terribly happy with off the shelve Lowes or Home Depot flooring, so we did some research.  I ran across an ad for someone local selling reclaimed wood flooring.  The craftsman we are working with goes around the local area and surrounding states to dismantle old barns and homes to relcaim the lumber.  He then remills old beams and other woods into tongue and groove hardwood flooring.  He is somewhat new to flooring, so we are his first customer outside of friends.

We chose to go with a mixture of red and white oak in the bedrooms and a mixture of maple and beech in the great room and kitchen.  The pieces of wood are beautiful - while remilling the wood, he was able to retain nail holes and saw marks.  Some of the wood has quarter saw marks.  It really looks great.  The flooring is almost an inch thick, so it has some serious strength to it.  Speaking of strength - Scott (our wood guy) told us to go to Lowes or Home Depot and count growth rings on their off the shelf hardwood flooring.  He said to then compare it to the wood he has provided.  We counted nine rings on the oak flooring at Home Depot and we counted approximately 36 on the oak that is going in our house.  That is some old growth lumber with serious strength.  

As with paint, we are concerned with VOCs.  The product we are using the cover our floor is called Rubio Monocoat.  It is a European product and has absolutely zero VOCs.  It is a one coat product.  It is unique in that it actually bonds to the raw wood.  If in the future, the floor gets damaged in some way, we can simply sand the spot and put more Monocoat on it.  Since it only bonds to the raw wood, there will be no lap lines and the oil will simply wipe off the wood that already has oil on it.  It sounds like it should be new technology, but it was developed in Europe soon after World War 2.  

We are so excited with how things are coming along!  Three more weeks until we can call it home :-)

Paint!

We have finished drywall!  We were told initially that the drywall would have a textured finish to it, but it is smooth!  We are much happier this way :-)

Paint was something that I tried to do a good bit of research into.  We are really concerned with indoor air quality as our house is very tightly sealed.  I stopped by Sherwin Williams to see what zero VOC paints they offered.  They have a line called "Harmony" which is zero VOC.  It is also $50 a gallon.  Ugh.  Behr offers a line of zero VOC paints as well, but they are a duo of paint + primer, which Dan hates with a passion.  Benjamin Moore also offers a zero VOC paint as well, but it is upwards of $70 a gallon!

In an effort to research appliances and paints, we signed up for a month of Consumer Reports online.  Ranked rather highly in the paint category was Glidden.  I went to Home Depot last week to do some research and the Glidden rep was actually there at the store.  He was incredibly knowledgeable and answered a lot of my questions.  The Glidden paint line, while not zero VOC is a low odor formula.  It really doesn't have an odor and goes on really well.  The rep recommended that we use a drywall primer/sealer since it is fresh drywall.

We did choose Glidden and got the new drywall sealer.  We used 15 gallons of sealer!  It took Dan right around 8 hours total to prime the house, but we did it!  On Sunday, we started to paint the walls and ceilings.  Dan tackled the ceilings, which is quite a feat with our cathedral ceilings in the great room.  Kole and I painted his room, the bathroom, and the laundry room.  We are using two colors, green and a light brown.  Kole's room is of course green!

Sorry my posts are random and rare lately!  We are in a crunch to get things ready to move our of our apartment and into the house in the next month!  And get our garden set up :-)  More later....

Drywall!!

We have drywall!  The crew that 84 Lumber contracts out is nothing short of amazing, really - 2 guys hung all of the drywall in our entire house in ONE day!  Ca-razy!  It was put up Wednesday and the finishing crew was there Thursday morning.  We hope to be ready for paint by this weekend.

Our tractor was delivered Saturday, as well.  Kole and I played around with it mowing some grass.  I love, love, love to mow.  It is so relaxing to me.  It was really nice to mow around where we plan to put our garden beds.  Dan went to work with it trenching for the electric to be run to the house.  It was absolutely a great investment and we can foresee many things it will be really useful for!

We spent the night Saturday.  It was wonderful.  It was SO hard to come back to the apartment last night, but at least now we know we only have a few short weeks until it is home :-)

The foreman

Gardening progress

This weekend we made some progress on our garden!  Since we are using the square foot gardening method, we needed to build some beds.  I bought some 1x8x8 cedar boards at Home Depot and had them cut in half.  I chose cedar because it is weather resistant and it looks pretty :-)

We, or more appropriately Dan, put 2 deck screws in each corner of the bed to connect the pieces together.  The beds are 4x4 feet.  We have three of them!

The spot where we are putting them for this growing season is where we eventually want to put our barn, so we are modifying things slightly so that they can be moved for next year.  We will be putting 3/4" plywood on the bottom of each bed, with drainage holes.  This way we won't lose any of the fertile soil when we move them!  We had initially planned to lay down cardboard to kill off the grass and then put a layer of chicken wire down to deter rodents, but we will go the plywood route so we can conserve as much soil as possible.

The beds will be situated north to south.  This will be easy since our house is oriented to the south!  Tomatoes, squash, and cucumbers will be grown on the north side of the beds so that they don't block the sunshine from the other squares in the garden.  We will be putting together a trellis system to train the tomatoes and other vines to grow on.  More on that when we get there!

This weekend we will be getting our tractor.  I plan to mow underneath where the beds will go and get them set up.  Next week, Kole and I will go to the local greenhouse for our soil mixture as well as some onion sets and get started!  Kole get a set of gardening tools for Easter, so he is set to help Mommy out :-)

Up tomorrow - drywall!

New roof!

This week has been busy and productive!  The roof is on the house!  We wanted to get the roof on before insulation and drywall, which was SUPPOSED to start today.   The insulation isn't yet finished, so drywall will start next week.  We are getting blown in insulation in the walls, as our house will have R30 walls and R50 ceilings.  We hope we will have no problems heating!  The progress pictures are on our camera, so once we get them loaded up on our computer I'll post some!

We also went this week and purchased our tractor.  We are getting a Kubota BX25.  It is a small workhorse of a tractor.  It comes standard with a front end loader and backhoe, which Dan is very excited about.  It will be put to use immediately when it's delivered next week - mowing, trenching some electric, and leveling a spot for our garden.  I can't wait!




                          Kubota BX25 (from Kubota.com)