The office

Here is a photo pictorial delineating the progress in the office:

1. The office in its natural state.
2. Vinyl tile was found under the carpet.
3, Under the tile was tar paper.
4. After laboring for hours with the wallpaper steamer, this is close to the final product, look at those floors!

Second Bedroom (Continued)

Here is a continuation of the progress on our second bedroom:

It has begun! Sarah removing paint from the window sills, with Fleabert looking on in nervous anxiousness.

Removing the tar paper & tar from the floors.

The some(what) finished product. It took about 20-30 hours to remove the tile and tar.

A month and half!

Well, it has been a month and a half since we first started our improvement projects! We started with paint removal, then removed the carpets in the bedroom and office, then removed the tile in the bedroom and office, took down wallpaper in the bedroom, removed the tar and tarpaper from the floors, removed the popcorn ceilings in both rooms, and have begun the monsterous task of removing paint from all of the trim, doors and baseboards in both of these rooms. On the side, we've done a smattering of other landscaping projects, including juniper removal and survey of our house! That's what I get for being an engineer :) We are going to start on our fence here shortly, so that should be another experience! The following photos represent a smattering of our progress to date:

The second (guest) bedroom:


Look what we found! Very old (1930's vinyl tile)


Ryan uses his large muscles to pry off wallpaper


A rather cantankerous layer of tar + tar paper under the tile.


Sarah using her large muscles to remove the popcorn ceilings, what a pain!

Ta Dum!

What a trip! Just got back from our Alaska vacation. Juneau is an awesome town, snugged amongst peak and glaciers. We spent five days up there visiting Sarah's mom and sister. Did a smattering of activities; hiking, riding the tram, sightseeing, going to a museum, going to Alaskan Brewing (twice!), and eating some tasty cuisine.

Back to home improvement projects. This paint removal will be the death of us yet. In fact, whilst I am blogging, Sarah is outside removing paint from our 106 year old heat vent grates.

Previous Progress

Figured it was due time to show some images of the house and some of the tasks we have been doing of late. We started working on the home in early April. We started off with paint removal. We purchased the Silent Paint Remover online to help us with this task. While spendy, thus far it has proved to be rather helpful. We started with the second bedroom. I ripped up the carpet to find linoleum tile underneath. After some researched, I figured this tile was likely from the late 30's to early 40's. Getting the tile off was a pain! Hours and hours of backbreaking scraping, only to find a layer of tar and tar paper underneath.

First Post!

Hi all! Though I would create a blog for any family/friends that may be interested in our home renovation. I will try to post on a weekly basis to add photos/commentary on our progress. Basically, the entire house (upstairs) was carpeted. In some cases, the carpet was merely laid over hardwood(living room + dining room), but in the den and bedrooms, linoleum and vinyl was laid on top of the hardwood floors, with asphalt paper and in some cases, actual asphalt. We have been plugging away on two rooms thus far.