The Floor Chronicles: Finished Product

Well kids, the elbow grease paid off. After sanding, staining, re-sanding the kitchen, 6 coats of polyurethane, and some extra trim painting clean up...here are the finished hardwood floors. Ooooooh, shiny!

Elbow Grease: The Floor Chronicles

Tommy decided he needed a vacation (i.e. time away from the coffee shop), since he rarely has more than 1 day off at a time. So, I decided to join him for a few days of vacation. This is what we did on our staycation. You may be thinking this is the "After" version. Oh no no no, my friends. This is the "Before" version of the first floor living space.

So, here's the story. The previous owners laid this thin Pergo flooring, which was OK (some may even say nice). But, we were fascinated with the hardwood that lay just beneath that Pergo. It consumed our thoughts whenever we walked over that rickety Pergo. Well, maybe not consumed, but it definitely bothered us.

Well, we got to the bottom of it, but it wasn't easy. Tommy made pretty fast work of ripping up the Pergo. It always seems like the demolition takes so much less time than the reconstruction.

This was an interesting find: a cement-like agent used over the hardwood for leveling the Pergo floor. It was interesting in that it smelled of urine.

We were really regretting our decision when we first saw the condition of the hardwood under the Pergo...as evidenced by Tommy's face.

Goose! No time for fun and games. This is a working vacation.

Amazing what a TON of scrubbing, scraping and mopping can do. The pre-clean side is on the left. The semi-clean side is to the right.

Making some serious progress and expelling some major elbow grease.


About 8 hours of serious scrubbing later...not bad! The next step is to sand and buff the floor, then refinish with a few coats of polyurethane. We'll probably need another vacation to do that. ;-)

Hello 2009, Goodbye Christmas Tree

So, the holidays are over. 2009 is here! Time to take down the Christmas tree. Luckily, there are several spots to drop off and recycle your Christmas tree in Chicago. We took advantage of this again this year, but added to the pile of lovely green Christmas trees with some of our recently pruned crabapple tree.

The red crabapples are a nice accessory to Big Red, don't you think?

A snip here, a saw-saw there...and voila!
A pruned tree that us shorties can walk under now.
Hopefully we didn't kill it.

The first step of recycling your Christmas tree is getting it out of the gangway and into your vehicle. Good luck.

Here we are at the recycling drop-off location in Humboldt Park (see the pile of trees over Tom's shoulder?). On certain days, the city workers have a huge chipper and run all the trees through. Cool. Bye Christmas tree!