As The Dust Settles

This weekend, we finished the demolition part of our living room redo, with the help of Sarah's Dad and Mom. Ryan and Dad took down all of the plaster and blueboard on the west wall of our living room to reveal the tongue-and-groove oak sheeting. As you can see from the spotted photos, it was a very dusty process.

After they got the plaster down, and removed all the nails related to the blueboard and plaster, we tried various ways of cleaning up the oak. We tried a palm sander and a wire wheel brush on the drill to try to clean up the surface of the boards without getting rid of the original saw marks. We found that the wire wheel brush on a drill did the best job of cleaning things up, and is fairly quick. After the holidays we hope to get that done to the whole wall, and clean up the plaster on the rest of the walls to get ready to do some finish work. Dad cleaned up and lightly sanded an part of the wall, and then applied polyurethane to give us some inspiration to work from.

Today, we worked on cleaning up the room, and putting our can't live without it stuff back in the living room (i.e. couch, tv, lamps, etc.). We really like the existing tongue-and-groove oak floors, except that they are a pain in the neck to clean because of all the cracks. We are looking forward to the smoothness of a laminate floor, but will miss the old look of the original floor. But hey, it will always be there under the laminate floor, and maybe 25 years down the road when it's time to redecorate again, we'll have more time, money and patience to revive that old floor :)

After we got everything cleaned up and put back, we put up our Christmas tree that we bought last weekend. It's pretty small, only 5 foot, but more than adequate for a room in transition. We hope to decorate it in the next couple of days.