I’m back, folks! Last week was a long and busy week for me. I hope you saw the note I put at the beginning of the previous post when I realized I was going to be away from the blog for an extended period. I needed to be away from the computer and blog-able projects last week so I could focus on getting ready for workers to be home starting today.
I was notified on Sunday, August 26th that the guys could start tearing up the floor and subfloor of the home gym on Monday, September 2nd. We didn’t know that day was a holiday, so the start day was postponed to today. But that gave me a week to clean up the home gym, find a place to put all the equipment we want to keep, get rid of what we don’t want to keep, and be ready for them to start working on the floor today.
So I spent every day last week doing exactly that. I had to start by clearing out a space large enough in the sunroom to store most of my home gym equipment. This was no easy task. That sunroom has been an out-of-control mess for years. And the side of the room where I wanted to store the exercise equipment (i.e. the side where I have the washer and dryer) was stacked with boxes that were full of stuff I hadn’t gone through in years.
Since this sunroom needs to be completely cleared before we do the kitchen addition (because the sunroom will be completely torn down), I didn’t want to just move the boxes from one side of the room to the other. I wanted to open the boxes and deal with the contents. That was the slowest job of the whole week.
I had boxes full of papers from over 20 years ago! There were huge files filled with all of my classwork from when I lived in Istanbul and attended Turkish language school. I hadn’t thrown away a single piece of paper from those classes, and that was in 2001! I had more files filled with receipts for all the bills I paid while living in Turkey, from rent to gas and electricity. Other files were filled with the letters Matt and I wrote to each other before we got married.
I also came across boxes full of items from my old interior decorating business when I worked at a local furniture and decor store called Spice here in Waco. Anyway, you get the idea. Much of the week felt like a trip down memory lane. I enjoyed the memories, but going through boxes of papers and making sure I didn’t throw anything important away is a boring and tedious task.
But I finally got it done and was ready to take everything out of the home gym. So here’s our home gym tucked away in a corner of the sunroom for now.
This whole process was bittersweet. I thoroughly enjoyed having this home gym for the 17 months we had it. It was so functional and practical, and I loved being surrounded by so much color. I will miss it. At the same time, I am also very excited to make it our permanent bedroom.
But it was a little sad to take over this room that I had invested so much time in…
…and undoing, and tearing, and going backwards. So this is what I’m left with after last week.
Once all the carpet tiles were in place, I could see all the damage they had done to the hardwood floor. It’s a bit of a shock to see it all at once. The floor was in bad shape when I laid the carpet tiles, but, except for one floorboard that was damaged, the rest of the hardwood floor just needed to be sanded and refinished. But now, sanding and refinishing couldn’t save these floors.
It’s hard to capture the extent of the damage in photographs. If you’re not standing in the room and walking on the floor, it’s hard to get a sense of how uneven and uneven the floor is.
But imagine that everywhere there is a floor joist there is a fairly high ridge and then there are valleys on either side of those ridges. And once I had laid all the carpet tiles, I realized that there are a lot more ridges than I had previously thought.
I thought the one I showed you earlier was the worst.
Apparently it was more noticeable because it was closer to the center of the room, so it was on the path where he walked the most.
There is another one that is much worse. This ridge is so high that it cracked the wooden floorboard.
And again, just to be clear, this isn’t the wood floor buckling and pushing up toward the ceiling. That high ridge is the floor resting directly on the floor joist, and the flooring on either side of it buckling down toward the floor. The weird thing is that the floor still feels strong. It doesn’t feel spongy or weak.
What really surprised me was that when I removed the carpet squares around the perimeter of the room, there was quite a bit of moisture underneath them. I had removed the carpet tiles from the entire center of the room weeks ago. The center of the floor had dried out completely. For some reason, I thought that having the large central area of the room uncovered would be enough for the moisture to escape and evaporate, but that wasn’t the case. There was still quite a bit of moisture trapped underneath these perimeter tiles. All of the dark streaks in the photo below are from water.
I can’t believe the damage these flats have suffered. It’s very disheartening.
But at the same time, I feel grateful. It was this floor damage that made me stop, look at the floor plan of our house again, reevaluate how we are using the spaces we already have, and change course on the long-term plans I had for our home for years. This floor damage saved us from going into a lot of debt and made us reevaluate the scale of the addition we want to build.
I am so thankful for that. If it weren’t for this floor damage, I would still be pushing to do a huge 1350 square foot addition, which would put us in debt for about $120,000. And now, because of this floor damage, we’re going to live with the space we have for the most part, just add a kitchen, and do all of that without going into debt. It’s a good life lesson, isn’t it? Sometimes those terrible things that happen are actually blessings in the end. Not always, but definitely sometimes.
It was a very productive week. I still have to go through, organize, and clean the other half of the sunroom before I can demolish the room. But we’re not ready to start the kitchen addition yet, so there’s no rush to finish that half of the room. For now, I’ve done everything I needed to do there.
For now, work will begin on the gym (soon to be bedroom). It will probably take them a few days to finish their portion, and then it will be my turn to install and finish the new flooring. On top of that, we are probably a week or two away from my workshop being built. My permit was approved, so my warehouse is in production. They will build it on-site, but I believe they will have things like the trusses pre-fabricated before they get to the site, so those things are on the production line right now. And then when the gym-to-bedroom conversion is finished and we move into that room, I will begin converting the current guest bedroom into our closet and workout space. And probably while that is being done, work will begin on the kitchen, and that project will begin with tearing down the sunroom.
Things are about to get tough around here. It’s going to get exciting!
Addicted 2 Decorating is a place where I share my DIY and decorating experience while remodeling and decorating the 1948 home my husband Matt and I purchased in 2013. Matt has multiple sclerosis and is unable to do physical labor, so I do most of the work around the house alone. You can learn more about me here.
