It's Where They Hid the Dead Body

Sometimes when you take on a remodel project in your house, it ends up being ten times bigger than you had anticipated.

Actually, this would be always in our case.

Maybe if we weren't such anal perfectionists.

This particular project started out innocent enough. "How about for Christmas we give each other new wood flooring?"

Brilliant.

So we saved up some money and bought a car load of flooring.

I started painting while the old carpet was in place.

Drip on the floor?  Oh well.

It was awesome.

The Man hates painting so that falls on to me.  The only bad thing about that is The Man gets antsy and wants to do something.  So he started pulling up the old carpet.

Here's where the project expands on us.

From here we should have just been able to lay down the squishy stuff (very technical term) that goes under the wood floor and then start laying down the wood.

But the more carpet The Man pulled up, the more he realized how much squeaking and creaking the carpet muffled, and now that the carpet was gone our floor was making all sorts of noises.

Needles to say, The Man decided that he just could not live with that.

I don't know if it's the perfectionist in him or the framer in him.

Maybe it's the perfectionist framer.

So the easy job became bigger as the man began to remove the sub-flooring.

This is how I was helping the whole process.

By removing the sub-flooring, it gets rid of  the squeaking and creaking.

It also needs to be replaced now. With a new firmly attached sub-flooring.  The creaking happens when the sub-flooring shifts.  West found that drilling screws into the sub-flooring wasn't helping to keep it in place so he decided to remove it all and start from scratch so he can make sure it's secure and not moving.

Another thing about remodeling an old house is that you never know what you're going to find when you start ripping things apart.

Like when we found the hole in our bathroom that was simply covered by the siding:

That, apparently wasn't the only surprise waiting for us.

You can see in this picture how our entryway had white tile in it:

When west broke the white tile he found that it was laying directly over other tile.

Which of itself isn't unusual, I guess it's okay to lay one layer of tile on top of another (this explains why we had no room to put a rug by our door).

But when he started to pull up that under layer of tile he found...

West started joking that this is were the dead body was hidden.

What it means in reality is that the floor in front of our front door is not anywhere near being level with the floor of the rest of the house.  They just filled it in with a ton of mortar until it was level with the rest of it.

The framer in West is screaming profanities at whoever built our house.

So now we (and by we I mean West) get to chip out all of that mortar, and then build the floor up the right way, you know, with wood, so it's the same level as the rest of the flooring.

Seriously.

Who knew that a simple tearing out the carpet and laying down wood slats would turn into such an ordeal?

So that's what we're working on this weekend.

And here's a beautiful video to start your weekend off.