We Redid Our Floors…Then Our House Almost Burned Down

Okay so the house “almost burning down” is a slight exaggeration, I’m not sure how slight because luckily we were home so we’ll never know what could have happened. But let me start at the beginning. For the last month Jakob has been working his normal 9-5, driving 35 minutes home, then working until 1 or 2 am on new floors for our house. What have I been doing to help the war floor time effort you may ask? Single parenting.

       Our basement floors have needed redone since we moved in. The carpet down there had been soiled by the previous owners pets, then our cats marking their territory when we moved in. We got them professionally cleaned which solved the problem for a while, until one of our cats got a UTI and started going on the carpet again. I told Jakob this fall was it, I was not having another winter with people over standing around on that carpet. We were hosting my birthday party at our house Nov 10 so October 11 we went out, bought the floors, and the race was on to finish them before the party.

        When at LL Flooring to buy basement floors, Jakob decided we should get LVP for the entire house since they were having a liquidation sale. I told him I didn’t much care what the floors looked like so he narrowed it down to 2 then I picked out of those options. After Jakob hauled almost 2000 square feet of LVP into our living room he started demo on the basement.

       After ripping up the carpet it was clear we’d need to paint with Kilz primer to make sure the odor of pet urine would be totally gone. If you’ve ever used Kilz you know how potent it is, if you haven’t, you can only imagine. We put the kids in our bed with us, the cats split between the kids bedrooms, and the dog in with us. We opened up every window in the house and went to bed. No one checked the weather that night and evidently after a warm October the temperature of course dropped that night. We woke up and the house was so cold we had to layer up for breakfast so we didn’t freeze.

       We finally got to actually getting the floor out to start laying it and turns out it looked a little different than the sample. The sample was all a solid oak color, the panels we were

looking at had white stripes in them. (The pictures look like different colors because I took them unde different lights.) Jakob and I both though they were going to look bad but we were kinda stuck, we couldn’t return it and didn’t want to risk trying to sell it and losing money so we decided to just lay it and hope for the best. Luckily, it ended up looking great.

    The basement didn’t take too long, and it was easy to keep the kids out of there while we were working down there, but moving upstairs to the main floor made things a little more complicated. We demoed the living room first, which had LVP and tile in it. Upon pulling up the LVP, we found a big red stain on the cement subfloor so someone may or may not have been murdered in the room…. Jakob used a hammer to shatter the tile in front of the garage door which was a loud I don’t know how the kids slept though it and left him literally bleeding. We were throwing all this LVP and tile into the rollaway in our driveway at 2 am, Jakob worried the neighbors were going to hear us and be upset. I told him they should appreciate us raising their appraisal values. At this point, we were still having fun. The next morning the kids got up and were very interested in the empty living room. Then within 10 minutes Elliot peed on the concrete.

       The living room floor didn’t take too long to do because there weren’t many cuts that needed done, but the kitchen we were not at all prepared for. We’d decided to just do the demo in the dining room and kitchen at the same time since the second week with the rollaway was almost up and we didn’t want to pay for a third week. Upon ripping up the linoleum in the entry area, we quickly found out that they had put particle board between it and the subfloor, and glued that particle board to the subfloor. Let me tell you how easy that is to get up: damn near impossible. It took Jakob not hours, but days, of sawing pieces by piece of that up. Moving onto the kitchen, we were happy to see that it was not glued down, it was stapled down. With about a kajillion staples. I’m talking about a staple every 3 inches. The convo while laying it had to go something like this:

“Hey Frank, how many staples we need?”

“More.”

“More?”

“Yeah. Once you think you have enough, add some more. Then, add a few more for good measure.”

“Uhhh… alrighty then, will do.”

        So we got this new vanity for the main floor bathroom. We were stoked, it was a $200 vanity for $60 for this local auction site. It sat in the back of my car for a week while we got to the point of being ready for it in the bathroom. Finally, we haul the box in. We take it out of the box. We’re marveling at the beauty… and Jakob sees a tiny chip in the side of the counter. Not ideal, not a huge deal. I’m reassuring him it’s not a big deal when we see the crack that runs from the back of the counter to the sink. It is what it is when you get something for so cheap. We’re planning to redo the countertops in a few years anyway and we decide we’ll replace that then. In the process of taking out the old vanity we broke the pipe and had to have someone come out to fix it. While he’s here the man says,

“You know this sink has a crack in it right?”

I explained that yes we knew and we were going to replace it when we replace the kitchen counter tops. The man says, “or it’ll be like that for 10 years until you move out or buy a new vanity.”  He’s probably not wrong if we’re being honest.

         We finally got all the staples pulled up, the floor in the kitchen laid, the particle board in the entry way pried up, the partition wall taken out, the floor laid, the baseboards put back up on the main floor, and we’re doing the finishing touches the week before my party. The one evening Jakob was trying to order new baseboards for the basement. The kids were climbing all over him and he exclaimed, “I have to concentrate!” The next day the new baseboards got delivered. The man brought them in and set them down. I looked at the baseboards in our walls, to the new ones on the floor, and back. I texted Jakob and asked if they were supposed to be shorter than the ones we had upstairs. After a 5 min back and forth about what exactly “shorter” meant he FaceTimes me, sees they’re not as big, then assured me it is Lowe’s mistake. He gets on to look at the receipt, and lo and behold it was not their mistake. clearly Jakob did need to concentrate, and didn’t.

    Jakobs truck was too small to haul them, hence the delivery in the first place, and the party

was days away so we just decided we’d install them and we’d have to paint where the old baseboards covered and new ones wouldn’t.  So we get those installed and the night before my party I’m decorating and my drunk sister, who came to town just for my birthday party, is failing at helping me decorate so I fired her. Jakob says she can help paint, which seems like a terrible idea for a drunk person but whatever. Well, it was a terrible idea because within the first 30 seconds she paints a swipe of paint on the floor, trying to paint the baseboard instead of above it like she was supposed to.

       Also the night before the party, Jakob is paining the wall where we took out the partition wall and where we removed our baby gate that was mounted to the wall. I said to him “remember the hallway where the baby gate is magnetic grey, not silver strand like the rest of the house.”  He did not remember.

       We had the party, and it was great. The floors look amazing. The baseboards have patch marks in them that need painted over in the hallway has two spots of light grey silver strand surrounded by magnetic grey, there’s LVP for the upstairs stashed under both our couches and stacked up in the office, the wall where the tv was moved from still has holes in it, the basement hasn’t been painted grey above the baseboards yet only primed. Elliot has a new favorite toy. The shop vac. And if you don’t let him have the shop vac, he will pretend the turtle sprinkler or the water pump/functional kitchen faucet is a shop vac. Oh and he pretends that our bottle opener is a staple puller. But hey! We got new floors and they look amazing! The rest might have been done if our house didn’t almost catch fire the day Jakob was planning to finish….

       Long story short, our outlet in our sunroom caught fire, Jakob put it out, then it re-caught fire. It sounds much worse than it was, we were home and immediately saw what was happening and got it out with a fire extinguisher. The biggest problem wasn’t the fire itself, but Jakob hacking into the wall with a saw because he thought he needed to pull out all the

insulation that had gotten burnt. Turns out he didn’t so we had to re insulate and dry wall our wall for nothing. We do have a

lovely accent wall in the living room now

though. The entire time this is going I’m texting my family group chat and my mom and sister are just interested in if the fire fighters are cute or not, and if they had a calendar I could get them.

       Our hero handy man (who my mom and sister were also very concerned about, in the looks department) came over and was able for explain to us that the outlet was improperly installed which allowed the fire to spark and spread, so he fixed that and then came back 4 days later to fix the rest of the outlets in our house. So now in addition to the things listed above that are unfinished in our house, we also have an unfinished wall in our living room. But hey the new floors look great, AND our outlets are all updated and properly installed!

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