The living room is a place to relax, somewhere to sink onto a couch with a good book after a stressful day. A place for the kids to build towns with train sets and Lincoln Logs on a rainy afternoon. Our living room was old. Very old and worn out! It was one of the better rooms when we bought the house, though, and we thought just a touch of TLC would make it a cozy place. Little did we know what awaited us in this room! The wallpaper seemed permanently attached to the walls, even with a steamer and then a special spray-on solution. The subfloor appeared to be just as securely attached, and became a huge frustration to Chris. The people who installed it had nailed it at one-inch intervals, so the pieces couldn't be lifted off easily with a crowbar. Chris worked for long hours after work, pulling out each nail. Finally, the original wood floors and plaster walls were exposed!
The room is very dark, since our house gets very little sunlight. We picked a nice shade of light blue, and put some polyurethane on the floors. The bumpy plaster walls looked just like concrete in that color, which was not the look we were aiming for! Then, as the polyurethane dried, the parched floorboards actually drank it in during the night. A layer of dust remained on the floor! Chris tried again, and the same thing happened. Finally, someone advised him to use an oil-based poly on the floors, and that one worked. We planned to paint the room again someday, but for now we could live with it. A few months later, in the spring of 2010, our kids had dangerously high lead levels. That led to a lead abatement, and meant moving out of our house for an entire month! We did it 13 months after moving in. |
Everything in the house had to be removed and packed into a storage unit. It was worth moving out, since we got new floors, doors, trim, windows and stairs. And our kids' blood was almost free of lead just two weeks after moving back in! This work meant we needed to repaint, so we chose a completely different color. The floors which had been so painstakingly uncovered had to be covered again. If we had known about the lead in the floors, we would have put wood on top of those subfloors in the first place!
Next, we decided to see if a wood stove would make our heat affordable. We knew when we bought it that an old, uninsulated house would be drafty. We didn't expect our heat bill for the winter to hit $6,000! After insulating, the next winter it was still almost $4,000. Something had to change, because we couldn't pay that much. While paying so much for heat, we shivered all day with the thermostat in the high 50's as we tried to keep the bills low. We dressed in lots of warm layers, but had noses and hands that felt like ice cubes. A wood stove's warmth sounded great! Chris built a hearth in the unnecessary doorway between the living room and playroom, and we bought a Woodstock soapstone stove that heats our entire house. Now we enjoy our very warm house every winter, for just $1,000 a year. We enjoy warm winter days inside our house, since it can be 85 degrees downstairs when the stove is going, but that's much better than being cold!
Next, we decided to see if a wood stove would make our heat affordable. We knew when we bought it that an old, uninsulated house would be drafty. We didn't expect our heat bill for the winter to hit $6,000! After insulating, the next winter it was still almost $4,000. Something had to change, because we couldn't pay that much. While paying so much for heat, we shivered all day with the thermostat in the high 50's as we tried to keep the bills low. We dressed in lots of warm layers, but had noses and hands that felt like ice cubes. A wood stove's warmth sounded great! Chris built a hearth in the unnecessary doorway between the living room and playroom, and we bought a Woodstock soapstone stove that heats our entire house. Now we enjoy our very warm house every winter, for just $1,000 a year. We enjoy warm winter days inside our house, since it can be 85 degrees downstairs when the stove is going, but that's much better than being cold!
In the spring of 2013, my Grandma gave us some furniture. Our very stained Ikea couch and chair went upstairs, and the living room got a new look. There's still work to do in this room (wainscoting and a gallery of old family pictures are two things on the idea list), but it's much nicer than it was just 3 years ago!