Returning to (Almost) Normal
Dear Family and Friends,
2 MONTHS IN!
I can’t believe we’ve owned our house for 2 months already. Time is quite literally flying.
We now have internet and telephone installed (that is a story in and of itself) and I can get back to posting “regularly” instead of back-posting as I have the past 2 weeks.
If you want to catch up, you can go back and read my updates here:
Week 7
As I am writing this, week 7 is still being formulated and will be posted “parallel”, so I guess we left off with us moving in.
We have lived in our house for 2 weeks now. It is a challenge, but we love it! There is something to be said for looking out the window straight into nature and having animals all around.
I am going to skip the rest of our moving in stories (you can read about them in week 7) and forge right ahead into the reality of us living on a construction site.
Plans Change
The original idea was to move into the basement while finishing the house and then just “moving upstairs” bit by bit and rooms were finished. That was when we thought all we would be doing was replacing some carpet and updating the kitchen while waiting for funds.
Like all good renovations, small things are starting to take on larger dimensions.
We realized we needed to remove and replace/update the wooden paneling in the living room and the stairwell. That lead to us discovering that the paneling was just covering a perfectly good ceiling (yay) and extra insulation.
Today, Thomas decided to look into the “attic” of the house. It is a utility attic much like the crawl-space of the house—you just don’t go in there on a regular basis. In fact, this house did not even have a finished attic entrance. Entering the attic involved carefully unscrewing a drywall element on the ceiling of the hallway and then moving the insulation lying above it.
This resulted in discovering that at one point there had been dormice in the attic (not unusual in the country) and Thomas deciding he needed a shower after he was rained on by mice pellets. They had chewed through one of the insulation battings and, well, Thomas is now really clean.
At some point, he suggested that SOMEONE go into the attic and clean in down. Someone small… tiny… perhaps female.
That attic is full of spider webs (love spiders) and wasp nests and all sorts of scary, halloweenish things. It does not, however, have lighting.
Thrilling!
This adventure has led to us considering if we want to increase the energy efficiency of the house. We could increase the insulation easily enough.
However, if we did it, we would want to see if there was a government subsidy for it. And we need to apply for the subsidy before we do any work, as it cannot be retroactively applied.
It would also involve us upgrading the heating system, which is a larger cost we truly were not anticipating. However, upgrading the heating can only be subsidized if we do all this work together.
Conundrum.
Add to that the struggles that are resulting from the photovoltaic which is not capturing the amount of energy it should. The insurance sent out an examiner last week, who confirmed that the only solution would be replacing the entire system. Something the insurance will not cover.
We purchased it from the owner of the house, so now Thomas has the challenge of knowing how to approach this. The owner technically had the responsibility to ensure we have a fully functioning system. We did not.
However, we are sure that he will not accept the fact that the system is so faulty. If ever we needed a miracle in this phase, it is here.
What am I doing in all of this?
Well, to be honest, the past 2 days I have spent sitting on the floor with a sharp putty knife in hand scraping glue off the bedroom subflooring.
“Why?” You ask.
Honestly, aside from the physical exercise I gain in scraping the floor millimeter by millimeter, it is to prepare the subflooring for a new floor.
Germans glue their carpets to the concrete subflooring. The idea of stretching it and using carpet nails is considered old-fashioned and impractical. Instead, they spread a layer of glue on the floor to prevent the carpet from creating “waves” over time.
This is a part of German life I will never understand. Accept, yes. Understand… nope.
The carpets in the house I grew up in are over 20 years old and never “waved”. Instead, there was the sub-carpeting and then the regular carpet. Removal is (relatively) easy and painless.
Here, we pulled it up not easily at all. Then, we discovered that the glue used in this house was a latex flooring glue.
From what I’ve read and heard, carpet glue is kind of a crap shoot. There are two main kinds: water-soluble and latex based. Water-soluble is the easier one to get up. It tends to flake up and there are machines that you can rent to “shave” it off the floor. Latex based, on the other hand, is stretchy and tends to just gum up anything used to release it.
Theory, Hypothesis, Experiment, Fail, Repeat…
7th grade science comes back to haunt you at the strangest moments. Thanks Mr. C!
Weeks ago, before the move took over our life, I tried out 5 different ways to remove the glue: soaking it with water, soaking it with a water-soap mixture, using soap at 100%, scraping without soaking and soaking and manipulating it for 2 hours with a water-soap mixture then scraping.
The only one to work was the 2 hour soaking and lightly rubbing before scraping. Of course it would be the most time intensive. That goes without saying, doesn’t it?
Thomas then decided last week to try the heavy-duty options looking for a quicker and more efficient solution. He ordered a professional sander with a grinding pad and tried industrial solvents.
The industrial solvent was from his time working at a bottling company and was used to remove the labels on the recycled glass bottles. That worked brilliantly. We are not quite sure how or why and there remained some question as to the intensity of the chemical reaction it caused. At that point we really didn’t care.
The catch: he only had a tiny amount and we didn’t know the recipe. We tried to find the same solvent, but we couldn’t. Thomas did not want to use straight acetone, because it could seep into the subflooring and through the concrete, causing issues with other elements in the floor such as our heating elements.
So off to “Heavy Duty Solution 2” (doesn’t that just sound like a bad B-movie? no? OK. Moving on.) The sander worked a treat. It is too difficult for me to hold, however. It also left a lot of “tacky” areas that we still needed to remove.
Then: Light bulb!
I had the BEST IDEA EVER!
Friends of ours have been renovating their amazing house for several years now and they told us the story of having to remove all the carpeting and apply multiple layers of Kilz® on their subflooring to cover up animal stains and odors from the previous owners’ pets.
I suggested we just even out the flooring and then “paint” the floors with a concrete sealant, sealing the tackiness and potential off-gassing in. I think it is a great idea. Thomas likes the idea of getting something done.
In the end, after sanding the majority of the large spots down, we decided to soak the floor with the water-soap mixture as I had done previously and then “work the glue” as best we could. We could then seal it if we felt it was necessary.
Thomas has no patience. Instead of waiting the 2 hours, he started working right away, using the sander to speed things up. It worked ok, and we were going to settle with it.
As we were cleaning things up, I used the putty knife from earlier to scrape up some of the dried bits on the floor we had done previously.
The glue just pulverized and came off easily into dust. So I sat down and started scraping. Wiping my hands across the floor showed me where the glue was still “tacky”. This worked great!
I am now ¼ of the way through the room and should finish easily in the next day or two. Yay! One room down and ready to be rebuilt… the rest of the house to go.
But.
It’s a start.
Coming home now, our day is starting to fall into a routine. We change into our renovation outfits (yes, we have “construction clothes”) and start doing something productive.
I will make us a dinner and we eat at the table like civilized people. Thomas even found the candles and we use a tea light in a crystal holder most evenings, just for the “romance”. Then, we continue working until evening.
We change out of our work clothes and hang them in the hallway. After we shower and are “undusty”, we can enjoy our evenings however we want. For me, that is working on a kitchen idea, researching renovation information we need for the house and writing for the blog.
It feels good to be moving forward. Even if right now it looks like we are moving backwards.
Ready to moving on to the next step soon.
