Modernizing

Almost two weeks ago now, we finally got a kitchen floor. So simple and such a pain to be without. Although I've already had to get on my hands and knees to clean up dirty little footprints left by one of our new kittens.

We've been in the house since July but the floor so far has been the bare floorboards left after the men took out the old grimy brown and orange linoleum.


Imagine the loose plywood in the bottom bit of the picture removed and that has been our floor. The bare redwood planks wouldn't have been too bad but the men only removed about half of the papery substance stuck to the floor beneath the old linoleum (just one of many shortcomings I've found, sigh). But now we have shiny new linoleum floor in a much more pleasing, mostly white pattern with black accents. I asked for checkerboard black and white but it wasn't in stock Still, installed, this looks very nice.


Try not to be critical of the mess, Patrick and I made separate dinners the night I took this - twice the mess. And I don't think I'll post the picture that shows the majority of the mess in the other corner of the kitchen.

So the next step we took to modernize the house took about all of Friday. But first, we decided on a bit of a whim Wednesday night that we needed a proper workspace to prepare Thanksgiving dinner for ourselves and my brother so we went to Ikea to buy the kitchen island we've been craving for at least the last two months. However... after spending a good hour there, we go in the warehouse to claim the 3 boxes for it and find it's sold out (very angry...).

And well, thwarted in our fun spending, we were considering going back to Ikea on Friday but with the nearly freezing temperatures we've woken up to inside our house in the last two weeks, we thought... better idea! Insulation! I had told my coworker last week that we had absolutely no insulation and her incredulous stare and repeated "Really!?" got me thinking... maybe Abel didn't say no insulation... so I asked Patrick to get on the ladder and look up there Wednesday night.


On the plus side, don't our rafters look nice and strong. So on Friday we went to Home Depot, very glad to find out that the insulation blowing machine was available and we bought 10 bags of fluffy pink fiberglass blow-in. With 10, just enough for R25 to R30ish through our whole attic, we got the machine for free for 24 hours too! We had to rent the Home Depot truck to get the stuff to our house but we did it in one trip and it didn't even rain so that was nice. And about 5 hours later, at least an hour and a half of that as preparation, our attic looked like this!


We put in barriers around all our pot lights and the shower vent and had to dig out the fluff that went in there anyway. Also, I was vacuuming bits of fluff that had traveled all around the house for the next two days to be sure that cats didn't try to eat anything but overall, between the two of us, it went smoothly and wasn't too difficult, only enough to make us quite sore. Patrick had the worse part of doing the blowing and crawling around the attic but my loading the machine and getting things for him was enough to make me hurt too, although maybe only half as much as him.

But it was definitely worth it. A week and a half ago, I woke up and turned on the portable heater to see it tell me that it was 39 degrees in the room. But this morning when we found ice covering our poor car outside, the bedroom before I turned on the heater was 47. Doesn't sound great but I'll take those 10 extra degrees if I can have it! In a few months, with a bit of money saved up, maybe we'll hire some people to come blow insulation into the walls and spray the underside of the floors. Then, our house will be a cozy little oven.