Today is Tuesday. 

It's one of those Tuesdays that feels like Monday. SIGH. I'm going to be messed up all week. 

So I thought I would share with you a little of what we have gotten ourselves into lately. 

Some really before shots of course because most of the progress we have made is behind the scenes so far. 

I think this is one of those things that is really overlooked in the whole before/after magic of the DIY universe. 

The real in the reality. You know that dresser that got all painted and looks spiffy for the camera. Does it still open and close the same with the paint on it? Is that house with the beautiful palette kitchen island. Is that island wobbly? Is it safe enough for kids to crawl on it?

These are the things that sometimes get lost in the fantasy of spending 500.00 and getting a brand new bathroom 'look'. 

One of the first things we tackled was the flooring. 

Here are some shots of the floor as it was when we bought the house and during the process of getting it functional. 

So this is a live chaos progress shot of the floor already having been removed to expose the subfloor in the hallway. That door belongs to the bathroom. I don't know why the guitar and the painting are there, I'm assuming we were ripping up carpet elsewhere and trying to get some space. 

After! The flooring we chose is a silver maple laminate. Not my first choice but with kids and animals it's hard to really say yes to anything else (in my price range). 

Now as BAM as this is, there was a lot of stuff that went into the whole process. Craig went around the whole hall bent over like an old guy with a walker trying to fix all the squeaks. He put more screws into the joists where he found them. We spent about 3 hours pulling up staples from the old carpet underlay and we also had to level out a section of the floor next to the closet door opening that had a serious sag to it. All of these things were time consuming and not so much in our pan for the attack. 

In the living room there was too much damage to let it slide. We had to replace huge chunks of the subfloor to deal with stains, warping and smell. There was a huge sag in the floor by the fireplace and there were places where it bounced. There was also crusty carpet underlay soaked in dog urine that would have taken way too long to scrape up. We chopped up about 4 sections like the above. 

Yuck!! We couldn't tell if it was dog urine or squirrels that had done this damage. There was another place where the squirrels had been removed. Either way, ICK! YUCK! BLECH

Very lucky to have a handy dandy husband with a lot of the tools and friends that got this job done in a hurry. He has the level out because the joists (long boards under the subfloor) were out by almost an inch. This is where the big sag/bouncy spot was. Fixed it up by sistering another board (attaching so they run parallel and are attached to each other for support) to get everything level. 

You might see the window with the drywall removed in the background. We investigated some mold that we found under the baseboards and realized that there was likely water coming in from the window. We were mostly right. We found insect damage behind the drywall under the window. We will eventually be replacing the window and re-framing the opening with wood that is not rotten. 

Flooring is just about done. It looks really nice to me! Of course that room was full of dog piss and 30 year old gross carpet not even 10 hours ago. 

Done! So much better.