Water In The Wall

So after we spent a weekend removing tile and grout from our dining and living room (here and here) I came home to this.

At first I thought Poseidon couldn't wait until we got home and had an accident (so sorry little buddy!). Upon closer inspection I realized that it was water damage and it was coming from the wall. Great (please note the sarcastic tone). Isn't that what everyone wants to home to? 

Once Jon got home he started to investigate. On the other side of that wall is our fridge. Jonathan pulled out the fridge out of its little nook and found the source of the leak. The water line back there had a hole in it and caused a watery mess back there.

He decided just to disconnect the water line and allow it dry overnight. We figured that once it dried out a bit back there we could see what the real damage was. The next evening it seemed a lot better and Jonathan said that the damage wasn't too bad. We don't think it was leaking for too long back there. Good thing I really wanted new floors! Otherwise who knows how long that would have stayed back there. We did have to leave the fridge pulled out into the middle of the kitchen for a few days. See it behind me?

But it wasn't nearly as bad as we first thought. Jon still had to repair the wall with some wall mud stuff but our new baseboards ended up covering where the damage had been. Apart from the patch job the worst part was living with the refrigerator in the middle of the kitchen. As you can tell from the photo above it was a tight squeeze getting in and out of the kitchen but it's a small price to pay when you think of how bad it could have been.

Luckily this mini crisis didn't delay our flooring project and we were still able to proceed with laying the floors the following weekend!

The Dust Bowl

On Monday I showed you guys our efforts from the first day of floor remolding project.

Yup, that's what we woke up to on Sunday. I had gone to Home Depot the previous evening to buy those big bags of trash bags (the ones that open up . Unfortunately they didn't have any so I had to settle for some big heavy duty trash bags.

As soon as I got up on Sunday I started to clean up. At first I just started putting big pieces into our trash can but that got full really fast. And it was super heavy. We had a couple of big boxes in our garage so I filled those up. There was still a ton of tile! Next I tried to use the trash bags. That didn't work out well since all the jagged long pieces poked holes in the bags. Tile is really heavy so I could only fill up the bags part of the way. In the end I broke up every tile square with hammer and gathered all the tiny pieces into the trash bags. It took forever.

Once we got all the fragments cleaned up we had to remove all the grout that was still stuck to the floor.  According to Jon this was a really important part of the project because we wanted all of our floors to be level when we were done. Always one for the details Jonathan wanted to absolutely sure the grout was gone.

My brother and mother came over to help us and between the four of us we started to remove the grout by hand. We had two scraper things and a two sets of hammer and chisels that we all took turns using. It was exhausting work. We were wiped out. I don't think my arms have ever hurt so bad. And we didn't really make that much progress. The only room we were able to completely de-grout- ify (yes, that's a real word) is the dining room.

The next day (it was Veteran's Day weekend) we decided to see if there was any liquid hat we could use to soften up the grout. Jon called Home Depot and to our shock and joy they did! He drove down to get some only to find out the person on the phone lied to us. Cruel, cruel lies.

Not wanting to come home empty handed Jonathan rented a huge power orbital sander. BEST TOOL EVER.

It allowed us to sand away the grout and left us with the smooth finish of the original concrete. My mom and I followed him around keep the cord out of his and sweeping up the super fine sand left behind. See the circles of the machine?

See how much sand was left behind? 

We had all the windows open and our fans on exhaust to help to get rid of the dust.

 We also wore googles and masks...

 but still dust got everywhere! In our ears, nose (so gross) and hair.

And that was our long weekend. Demo and dust. Dust everywhere. All of our furniture in the garage. A kitchen closed off by plastic tarps. Our house looked like a tornado had hit. And since the weekend was over we had to leave it until the next weekend. 

Demolition Derby

Remember how nice and fall-y our house looked? Well a few days after those photos were taken our house looked like this...

Yup, Jon and I tackled our floors in November. When I say November I mean all of November. Every single weekend. In case you guys haven't noticed my blog posts have been pretty infrequent. At first it was the jet lag and getting back into the swing of things after such a long vacation (hard life, I know). I kinda got back into the groove but then we decided to redo our floors and temporarily turned our home (and lives) upside down. 

Its no secret I hated our tile floors. I'm pretty sure I've told everyone I know how much I loathe tile. Thanks to my annual bonus and some back pay from my promotion way back in July we had some extra cash. Normally that would be my Black Friday money (don't judge me, I love a deal) but this year I told Jon I wanted to put that money towards new floors. Luckily he agreed (he's the best husband... truly) and thus we went floor shopping.

If this was our forever home I think we would have saved up a bit more for hardwood but after doing some research we decided on laminate flooring. It looks just as pretty as hardwood (I think so anyway), can handle Poseidon's nails, is easy to install and it was in our price range. I chose a darker, reddish tone color that I got on super sale at Lumber Liquidators and while I went to pick it up Jonathan got started on tearing up the tile.

Check out a messy before.

And once the demolition derby started.

Jonathan (and a friend) used a chisel and hammer to tear up most of it. Tile and grout make a HUGE mess. There was dust everywhere. All of the furniture was placed in our garage and we taped off the kitchen was plastic tarps.

They had to wear masks over our nose and mouths because we're pretty sure it is not a good idea to breathe in all that dust. Jonathan also opened all the windows and we placed fans around the room to try to push out the dust.

You can tell but the lighting that this process took all day. Since we didn't have any heavy duty trash bags we just left the mess downstairs. Out of sight, out of mind... until the next morning.