Lofty Ambitions

When we pulled down the old ceiling tile in the living room, we were thrilled to discover old wooden beams criss-crossing our ceiling. Not only did they look good, but they added at least another 5 or 6 inches to the ceiling height.

We plan to leave the beams exposed and paint them white, so our living room ends up looking something like this:

The ceiling of our dreams

Yeah, I know, if our living room ends up looking even remotely like that one, we’d be lucky. But a girl can dream, right?

Our only hesitation is that our contractor thought that without insulating the ceiling we’d lose a lot of heat. We figure we need the heat in the bedroom above it anyway, so so what if the heat drifts upwards through the spaces between the floorboards. Your thoughts? Is it inefficient heating-wise to leave the ceiling unfinished?

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Day 3: Floored

I honestly can’t believe the rapid progress we’re making on the demolition phase. Nick has been putting in full days since Saturday tearing out ceilings and busting through walls. Herewith, photographic proof of his progress:

The living room ceiling before:

Living room ceiling after:

We’re going to pull down those thin wood slats and leave the ceiling beams exposed after painting them white, which will help bounce some much-needed light around the room.

I spent about half of Saturday, and my brother Jay helped Sunday morning, pulling up the old cat-pee stained carpets upstairs. Ripping up the carpet was pretty straightforward, especially since they were poorly installed to begin with and were disintegrating due to constant dampness thanks to the three mangy cats who lived in the house before we bought it and seemed to have used the entire upstairs floor of the house as their personal litter box.

We were delighted to find wide plank pine flooring in what will be our bedroom and in the “third bedroom.” (That’s in quotes, because it isn’t really private enough to be considered a bedroom. We’ll probably use it as either office space or a sitting area, maybe a play area for Sadie.) Jimmy Sanderfloors said he could sand this down:

We were also delighted to find wood in Sadie’s future bedroom. The planks looked a bit odd, almost like beadboard, but I figured that was nothing a good sanding couldn’t take care of. Unfortunately, our future sander, Jimmy Sanderfloors, just told us that that type of wood, whatever it is, can’t be restored after all.

With the carpet removed, and one sheet of plywood lifted, the original beadboard floor is revealed.

Neither can the wood floor in the “dining room” (our current term for the room next to the living room, that will probably ultimately be used as a crafting/TV room. If we ever get a TV, that is.) This was a surprise, since we thought that was the ONE room in the house that wouldn’t need new floors! In fact, we were going to get wood to MATCH that flooring so we wouldn’t have to do the environmentally irresponsible thing of pulling out a perfectly good floor just so that it would match our new flooring in the adjacent room. But considering it can’t be refinished after all, I’m not sure how we’re going to proceed.

Dining room floor, which apparently is not worth saving, and which may even be moldy underneath.

We had considered bamboo for the living and dining room, because it is very hard, renewable, and relatively inexpensive, but decided that it wouldn’t look quite right in a house built in 1874. Right now we’re thinking we might go with more wide plank pine.

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