Home Improvement
Since buying our house in August, living with Matt has become like living with Bob Vila. Matt is Mr. Home Improvement all of a sudden! And I don’t say that as a complaint, it’s nice having someone who can do stuff around the house. Especially since our house is over 115 years old. It’s in good shape, but we do have little renovations we’re eager to make.
Matt’s first project was building this stage in our basement:
The stage was pretty exciting because when we had our housewarming party we had people playing music in the basement. But tall musicians were urged to take a seat, because our basement has verrrrry low ceilings.
The attic was our next project.
The attic is a nice little room, but the floor was hideous, as you can probably tell from those pictures! The floor was mismatched linoleum circa 1959. Some had these blue squares on them, some looked like a Jackson Pollock painting gone horribly wrong, and some had really tacky flowers on it. It was peeling off, too! Really gross. Our area rug did not sufficiently cover the ugliness.
On Sunday evening, we went down the street to RJ Crowley’s for some beer and dinner. We started talking about the attic, and Matt suddenly said, “When we get home, let’s tear off the linoleum from the attic floor.”
So, around 11 PM, we trudged on up to the attic, and ripped apart the linoleum! It was pretty disgusting, but we found lots of newspapers from 1959! A lot of it was department store ads which were actually really cool…so we’re going to do something with that. Some kind of collage might be neat…
Yesterday we went to Lumber Liquidators in Woburn to buy some hardwood flooring. We ultimately settled on bamboo floors, because it was not only very reasonably priced and attractive, it’s better for the environment!
But first, Matt decided that the attic could be insulated better to save on energy costs, both during radiator season and air conditioner season. So, we went to the dreaded Home Depot (which I despise, but it’s like going to a toy store for Matt) to buy insulation.
We bought this stuff (except the R-19) because we like the Pink Panther:
Donning the following:
and
and
we tore apart the floor boards and stuffed the insulation in. It took about 3 and a half hours. The attic was chilly but we were sweaty so our goggles kept fogging up. It got stuffy under the respirator masks and they smelled kind of funny.
Three and a half hours later we took VERY long showers to insure that we got every last bit of fiberglass off our bodies.
I think installing the insulation was the worst part and that’s over with…but this weekend comes the major work: installing the floor.
Can you believe it? ME doing hard physical labor in the name of home improvement?! I’m definitely the type to pay someone else to do things around the house instead of doing it myself. (I’ll admit it, I do have some JAP-ish tendencies, that being one of them!) It doesn’t help that I have tonsillitis and felt awful yesterday, haha. But I do think the overall result will be far more rewarding this way. We’re going to have an awesome looking attic! (It will also serve as our guest room, so come on and visit if you don’t live around here!) :-)
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