Rookie Mistakes

Lately ever project we do goes very smoothly, but our most recent project reminded me that this was not always the case - there was a project where Eric and I screwed up big time. I got to thinking about this because we are working on updating our half bath downstairs. Currently this bathroom reeks of some sort of animal urine and we decided that since we are on a "bathroom update kick", we might as well tackle this one next. So, let me not get off topic, you can read more about the bathroom renovation in some upcoming posts, but for now let me tell you about the project we screwed up. You will see how the bathroom project ties in later...

Back when we first bought the house, the kitchen was our first major project. We had this notion that we would find beautiful hardwood under some old linoleum because we had that kind of luck in every other room when we ripped up carpet. This was rookie mistake #1; we assumed the best when in home renovation you should ALWAYS assume the worst and then be pleasantly surprised by anything better.

This mistake resulted in a weekend of me crying as I ripped up sheet after sheet of old linoleum finding only really nasty sub floor beneath.

Which leads me to rookie mistake #2; that sub floor was totally awful and should have been replaced. Half of it was "beaver board," a material I can only describe as compressed sawdust that rots if someone even breaths near it. After a grueling weekend of pulling up linoleum, Eric and I just couldn't see ourselves then also pulling up old sub floor. We needed a kitchen and still had hardwood to lay, not to mention removing the sub floor would have meant we would need to remove our cabinets that had been installed on top of the sub floor which were also full of all our dishes, pots and pans and food. We knew we were in over our heads, but we should have stepped back and recognized that doing the job right would have been better than doing the job quickly.

This mistake resulted in a bunch of issues. The first is that after laying the hardwood floors, we realized the kitchen was a good 2 inches higher than the rest of the house. We now have to make our own custom thresholds for the 2 entrances which hopefully will fix the "tripping trap" we created.

We also realize that the likelihood that we will one day have to rip up the floor because of a rotting sub floor is great. This is where the half bath renovation comes in. We are currently ripping up all the sub floor in the bathroom in order to remove anything that could be causing it to smell. In this process we found that the bathroom( which is off of the kitchen) is also 2 inches higher than the house because it has 4 layers of sub floor, 2 of which are completely rotten. Try and guess what those sub floors are made out of - yep that's right - BEAVER BOARD! Its a total mess and we realize that its only a matter of time before our kitchen sub floor rots to the point of needing to be replaced. On the scale of serious rookie mistakes, this was probably our biggest - "haste makes waste."

Our final rookie mistake is that we listened to advice from someone at a paint shop about how to match our new hardwood floors to the existing ones. The guy took a piece of wood, slapped on some stain and polyurethane and told us it was a "perfect match." Well, after staining and then sealing our newly laid hardwood floors, we discovered that they couldn't be further from a "perfect match." Every time I look at our kitchen floor I ask myself how we could have been so stupid. Eric and I usually have a great "checks and balances" system for our projects. He and I often have the opposite opinion on how a task should be completed, so we end up having to debate and discuss our projects at length before coming to a decision about how to execute. Why we both unquestioningly followed bad advice is a great mystery.

The kitchen project has become our great do it yourself learning experience. We screwed up at almost every junction in this project and we both know it. Things have been going so great since then and I almost forgot about the kitchen disaster. This bathroom project has reopened those old wounds. We again were faced with needing to replace the floor and again were disturbed at what we found under the linoleum, but this time we decided to do the job right, so when that bathroom is complete there will be no question of its value.