Mistakes

Found here. 

"I hope that in this year to come, you make mistakes.

Because if you are making mistakes, then you are making new things, trying new things, learning, living, pushing yourself, changing yourself, changing your world. You're doing things you've never done before, and more importantly, you're Doing Something.

So that's my wish for you, and all of us, and my wish for myself. Make New Mistakes. Make glorious, amazing mistakes. Make mistakes nobody's ever made before. Don't freeze, don't stop, don't worry that it isn't good enough, or it isn't perfect, whatever it is: art, or love, or work or family or life.

Whatever it is you're scared of doing, Do it.
Make your mistakes, next year and forever."

-Neil Gaiman

I was attracted to this quote and then realized that this quote applies perfectly to our floors right now. We are in the process of refinishing the floors and a project that we thought would take on weekend has extended to one month. And, we aren't even done! We are making one mistake after another, having to re-do things, re-send, re-stain, re-think. But, eventually it will be done, for better or for worse, and we will be able to move on and will hopefully know how to do it better next time (or just hire someone)!

House project #2 Tearing down a wall

The moment I saw this house I knew I wanted to tear down the wall between the dining room and kitchen. I love open floor plans and if I'm in the kitchen I want to be able to see at least part of the house and not feel like I'm stuck in one room.

The wall we are tearing down is the purple/green wall (see picture below). At this point I had already painted over the crazy colors. I painted a primer so we have to pick colors and paint all the walls, but that is for another post. This view is from the front door looking left into the dining room. The kitchen is behind the purple wall.

I will show you the before and after pictures first (so you can compare) and then show you the progress!

View of the kitchen from the dining room.

View from kitchen to dining room

Progress:

Pulling the plaster off and prying the boards off. I took twice the amount of time I should of taken, but I got it done eventually! :P

Dusty work.

While taking the wall down we discovered a heat duct was in the wall going to the second floor. So we took the duct out and will move it to the left of the door frame.

Overall this was a pretty easy task, quite basic, it just took some time. It really is amazing how pulling down a wall can make such a big difference. One important thing to think about if you want to tear down a wall is whether or not it is load-bearing.  You don't want to tear down a wall and have the top floor end up sagging down (or even collapse over time!) because there isn't enough support anymore. This wall was load-bearing, so as you can see in the after picture below, there is a new beam up above the opening. I wasn't around to document this but my brother and dad had to support the wall with 2x4's going from the floor to the celling to hold it up and then added the beam above. So, if you are tearing a wall down please talk to someone who knows what they are doing.

A note from Aurelien: A complication we encountered after we had put the new beam up in place was that I noticed that the floor under the left frame was sagging noticeably! In investigating the matter, it turned out that the door frame had not been directly on top of a cross beam in the basement as we had assumed. This was a mistake from a previous remodel.  Thus the new beam we had placed to support the 2nd floor was not being properly supported on one end in the basement!  To fix this we had to jack up the floor from the basement and layer some 2x4's between the foundation and the floor to give it the support it needed.

Okay, time for the after pictures! As you might notice in the after pictures the floors have been sanded down, but that is for another post. 

Once again, the before, so you can compare. :

New view from dining room! We love the exposed brick from the old hidden fireplace, but the brick work isn't very pretty, we might need to figure out a way to clean it up a bit.

Before picture from kitchen to dining room:

After

There you go! Next house post will probably be about our floor saga...

House Project #1 Kitchen Floors

When tackling a huge project, like fixing up an entire house, it's best not to think too much about what needs to be done and just go for it. The day after we got the keys to our house we went in and started working. I starting painting over the very bright colors and my dad and husband went to work pulling up the linoleum in the kitchen.

First Project, kitchen floors.

We were excited to discover that the original hardwood floors were under the linoleum. The problem was the wood floors were covered up by three layers, two layers of linoleum and then then plywood. The linoleum was glued to each other and the plywood was nailed to the wood floors. Because of this it required us to first peel back the first layer of linoleum and then use a saw to cut through the plywood because it's super hard and nailed down. This whole process took about 7 hours.

Here we are pulling up the first linoleum layer, this was hard work! The glue they use is no joke.

Then my dad came in and used his saw to start cutting through the plywood. At this point I left this project and started painting the walls.

Seven hours later, plus an extra hour to get rid of the lower cabinets, we had a linoleum free kitchen! Notice all the black glue stuck to the floors. We ended up scraping the glue off by hand. 

Yes

"Healing of the physical without the change in the mental and spiritual aspects brings little real help to the individual in the end. How true, because the mind and the body imprint imitate each other. What we think we become. What we become, we think. It's an insidious process that can predispose us to illness or it can lead us to health."

Edgar Cayce


“The softest things in the world overcome the hardest things in the world.”

Lao Tzu (4^th Century BC)

Famous Chinese philosopher who advised his millions of followers to wield power with love, not force.

New House!

After years of watching HGTV's House Hunters and renovation shows my husband and I have been dreaming of buying a home and fixing it up. Living in California made that impossible, but now that we are back in Iowa, our dreams have become a reality! We ended up buying a foreclosure about a week ago. The closing process was simple and fast, something I wasn't expecting. Another surprising part of this whole process was how quickly we found a house we wanted to make an offer on. I ended up only seeing 6 houses (my husband only saw 2) before we found this house. The reason we really liked it was because it has a lot of potential, satisfies our desire to fix it up, but we didn't need to do too much work because the foundation is solid.

Our plan so far is to: completely redo the kitchen and bathroom, sand and refinish all wood floors, paint ALL of the walls, put in new windows, clean up all the siding, paint the exterior trim, do some roof work in the winter and clean up the yard/front bushes and deck.

We hit the ground running because we are doing most of the work ourselves and my dad, who is the leader/actually knows what he is doing, is leaving for Hawaii in a few weeks. We wanted to get as much stuff done as we could before he left. Move in date looks like March 1st, because we want to spend some time designing our kitchen and not rush it!

I'm going to break each project into different posts. First up, tearing the kitchen linoleum up (we are not going to miss it!). Also coming up, Florida recap! I am missing the weather/beach.

Happy New Years!

May 2013 be filled with tons of love, happiness, laughter, peace, good food, inspiration, adventures, growth and contentment.

Just One Change

There are many people on the internet that inspire me. Sarah Britton, a holistic nutritionist, chef and blogger is one of them. I have been reading her blog for a year now and was excited to discover that she posted a video of herself speaking at a TEDx Amsterdam. Her topic was about nutrition and food habits. This is a big passion of mine, but I feel that anyone watching her talk would be inspired. Sarah is an encyclopedia of holistic nutrition, she can rattle off the benefits of any plant based food and she talks about them in such a way that you probably will want to go straight to the store and buy the food.

Her passion for food is contagious, inspiring and her video was oozing with excitement. The theme of the talk was encouraging everyone to make just one change a day. One example is reaching for brown rice instead of white rice at the grocery store. Even just that simple step of picking out a different rice while shopping adds up. And if you make one change a day, in one year you will have made 365 changes. It's simple, but also very effective. Her talk has other interesting points so if you have 16 minutes to spare I recommend it! Also, her blog, My New Roots, has amazing recipes and a lot of information.