Friday floor update - 8/19/22 - 10/2/22

This post has been in the making since about April of this year. Yes, we may just be that slow :) As I wrote about in an earlier post, the floors in this house needed some extra support. After installing some additional supports in the crawl space earlier this spring, we were trying to decide what to do with the existing floors in the new master suite. The floors on this side of the house had the most wear and several buckles. Originally, I had wanted to save the floors but Jeff talked me into tearing them out and replacing them with wood that we had saved from other areas of the home. As they were tearing them out, we realized very quickly that the subfloor (if you can call it that) was just another layer of flooring installed in the same direction as the top layer of flooring. Hence, the buckling. So, out went the subfloor layer. Then, hmmmmm. These floor joists don't look so good. So, out with the floor joists! While this was a huge project, I am so glad we did it. We were able to install one more support under the house while we had it opened up to the crawl space and the floor is now solid. We also took the opportunity to clean out the crawl space and install a moisture barrier to keep it dry under the house.

So, here are the photos chronicling this ordeal. Feel free to enjoy our pain as we tore out closets that had already been installed and realized that if we had just done this from the start, Jeff would have saved years of his life that he lost crawling under the house to add supports. We're amateurs, what can I say, lol!

Here is the master bedroom when we first got started. It was originally going to be the family room, but as I mentioned previously, we flipped the footprint early on when we discovered that we could remove a few walls on the other side of the house. The girls and I and some friends spent hours chiseling off the tile that was glued down over the hard wood. Its fine....right? Its totally fine that we broke our backs, knees and fingers on this useless project 😬

To the left is the room that originally was going to be the kitchen but is now the master bath, laundry room and half bath. Not a whole lot of time was wasted on this floor early in the project so that helps make up for the rest of the time wasted :)

Below are the pics that show the extent of the damage. The 2 photos on the left are the master and the 2 on the right are the bathrooms/ laundry.

Below, you can see the space below the new bathrooms/ laundry area as they were cleaning it out. What a difference!

New floor joists and subfloors!

And last but not least, we have new walls and closets....AGAIN 😆

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So, remember early on when I mentioned one of the draw backs to saving old materials from a project is having to move it multiple times? Well, here we are. The girls and I have not only removed the nails from all the wood, but we have stacked it, moved it, re-stacked it, moved it again and stacked it again and again and again.

Coming up, we have been working on installing new flooring in the master using the wood that we saved from the walls. We needed to move a pile to be able to install the beam where we want to remove a wall so we just decided to use it up instead of moving it again. I have taken more heat about saving this wood, but I cannot tell you how glad I am that we did. It is a cost savings AND it adds back the originality of the home that we had to remove. Win, win. Boom!