We Are Men

Ahh... the joys of some piece and quiet and a little time to work.

My dad stopped by the same weekend as the infamous "girls retreat". It was great it gave us guys a chance to get together to get some good work done on a house. My dad and I decided to start by tearing down all the junk in the bedroom and and making it look nicer.

These are the "lovely" colors we started with

As you can see there wasn't a whole lot to work with in the first place, between the green shag carpet and the fake wood laminate walls, we decided to tear it all out and refurbish what we could. Taking down the laminate wall was pretty easy. We didn't even need tools.  I just grabbed the corner and just tore it off. Too bad the rest of the work wasn't that easy...

The wall after taking the laminate off

After removing the carpet we got a chance to inspect the wood floor underneath. Thankfully it was the original hard wood floor. We realized instead of replacing the carpet we could just refinish the floor. Thinking about it was the easy part, there where a couple of problems with it. First, one of the boards was missing from the floor. It turned out that we would have to fit and finish a new piece of flooring. Second, the old carpet we tore out wound up being stapled directly to the floor so I got to spend a few hours on my hands and knees tearing out the old staples one by one. By the time that I was done I wound up getting pretty good and tearing them out and had a nice sized pile of staples. Sadly, we didn't take any photos of the piles.

The missing part of the floor, after we ripped out all the Spackle that was standing in for the actual floor

But we being Anderson men, were able to make short work of the problem and get a new piece of floor after running to Menards.  I'll skip some of the boring details, but we eventually we finished it and got the new piece of floor to match up.

Replacement floor

Before we started on the floor, we decided to finish the wall, the one idea that I wanted was to insulate the wall for sound proofing.  It would make it easier to sleep when people where being loud in the next room (i.e. me). It turned out to be extremely easy to install.

Insulation just shoved in

With a little more elbow grease we where also able to install the new pieces of dry wall, which I was surprised to find that they weigh much more than expected.  

My dad attaching the last few screws

We also got to start mudding the cracks and sanding to make it nice and even. 

Love that my dad is tall

The next part turned out to be the really fun part. The sanding. We rented a floor sander and started sanding thinking that it would be a nice easy process, it turned out that we had a few obstacles. Because the floor was never cleaned in the last 20 years or so (judging from when green shag carpet was last fashionable), there was a bunch of gunk on the floor that wound up ruining the sanding discs, we needed to take a couple of trips to the store to grab more.  After a few hours of sanding, staining, and finishing we had a great new floor to show off along with a nicely matched wall.

After all that, in the words of my dad, Mr. Fix-It Mark, "Isn't this nice?"

"Isn't this nice?"