Back from the Biltmore

Well we went to North Carolina this past weekend. And the 8 hour drive from Florida to North Carolina was very refreshing, especially after the hard week we had before. We went to go visit the Biltmore and get some inspiration for our house. Needless to say all it did was get me depressed. My house, nor anyones house can compare to the Biltmore. I swear, they had one room where it was about 4 times the size of our house. I couldn't believe the size and detail that this house had. Was a very good visual of what houses were like back in the 1800's. Well I wanted to take pictures of the inside, but was told that I could not do that, so we only have pictures of the outside. But I did find some on the internet, so I will post those, even though that is not what it looked like when we went. Anyways the house seemed like it had 300 rooms. They had a room for everything, sleeping, bathroom, kitchen, canned food room, bottling room, planting room... you name it they had a room for it. This is one house I will put a bid on when I see it on the Asheville listing. Anyways here are our pictures:









Mrs. Vanderbilt's Room: Yes folks that is gold on the walls.



The Chandelier: This thing is 3 stories high!


The Dining Room

Yoda 1995 - 2005

Our dog Yoda died yesterday after going to the vet because of injuries. I just wanted to let everyone know and hope that everyone will pray for our dog. He was a good dog. We saved him from an animal shelter in Georgia after hearing that he was used in a puppy mill to produce puppies. The owner was caught with 50 dogs in her house, all in cages and all were used to make puppies. We were told of this and drove to Georgia to help any dog we could. When we got there, Yoda was the only one left. He was very old at about 10 years of age, but we adopted him anyway. In his 10 years at the puppy mill, he never ever saw grass and was never let out of his cage. He had many ailments, but was in decent shape. For the last 4 months we gave him the best life he could have. From playing in the parks in Springfield to taking walks down the street, he loved his last days. I know he was very thankful to us for giving him such a great life and I know that the last 4 months made up for the 10 years that he was couped up in a cage. Yoda is now in a better place and we will always miss him, but I know he is always with us.

We will always love you Yoda.

Yoda the dog

If you don't know we have 5 dogs - 4 chihuahua's and 1 lab-chow mix. Their names are Peanut, Yoda, Charlie, Tinkerbell and Chewy. Well today was a sad day, when I went home to walk my dogs I saw blood all over the ground. I was panicking and walked into the room to find Yoda witha cut on his stomach and his intestines hanging out. I was in shock and called Lita. We rushed him to the vet and they took him in. Lita cried and cried, and I just couldn't believe what had happened. He was ok in the morning and I took him out with everyone else and he was fine. We paid the $400 fee for surgery and the vet said that as long as nothing internal was damaged that he would sew him up and give him antibiotics and he should be ok.....

Well 2 hours past and the vet called me saying that there was no damage internally!!!! He had closed up his wounds and was asleep. Me and Lita were so happy, now we just have to watch over him and make sure that his wounds don't get infected. What a week we were having! Yesterday the dogs got poisoned when we fed them macadamia nuts and today Yoda almost got split open like a watermelon. I just can't wait for this week to end, I don't think I can take anymore dog related problems. Thank God he has gotten through his first test.

Down comes the kitchen

Yesterday we had some friends (Pete, Travis and his wife, Afrie) came over to help demolish our kitchen. This was our first time every knocking down a wall, or taking shelves out. I must say it was pretty fun! Well we didn't do too much knocking since our friends were enjoying themselves, but it was great watching the wall go down.


Here's what part of our kitchen looked like, because of FCC rules I won't show the rest.


Pic of the sink area while getting its beatdown.


This is the counter, well what's left of it. Actually it's sitting outside by the curb.


Travis ripping down a wall with his bare hands


Looky what we found behind our kitchen wall... Exterior siding. Looks like the PO didn't feel like tearing it down. That's good for us because now we can reuse the siding for some of our damaged boards outside.


Here I am acting like I'm doing work.


Here is the wall half way down


You can now see the next room from the kitchen. Joy!!!

Who ya gonna call... Linoleum Busters!

Here are more pics of me and Lee busting up linoleum:


Heres Lee using his 'Proto Gun' to blast the bugger away.


Here I am, not using a proton gun. I guess I haven't earned that yet.


Here's Lee again hard at work.


Here is the aftermath, only a little in the middle to do, but basically all done.


Here is what is left on some areas. Gummy black tar like substance, I hope it sands off easy.

Tomorrow: Demolition of our kitchen! And moving a wall back so that our kitchen will be way way bigger.... MUAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!!

The PO's POed me!

I guess you can tell that I am mad at what the previous owners did to the house. I decided to finally rip the pee soaked carpet in our living room yesterday. As I was in my Incredible Hulk stage, ripping at the carpet and foam pad, I was greeted by some mysterious padding.


It looks like it is some super linoleum.
It was very hard to get off, so I used my trusty new weapon... Lee, my next door neighbor.


Lee was a pro at attacking these new enemies of mine. We started at around 8 and worked our way all the way to 3 in the morning. It was a long and hard process of carefully prying them up but the end result was worth it. Hopefully I can rent the drum sander again and sand my way through the last bit of glue/tar like substance. If anyone has any idea what these are it would be great to know. One weird thing was that it wasn't one whole piece you had to strip.


It was actually individual square pieces with smaller square pieces in the middle. It must have been a back breaking experience putting this thing together. Too bad it was worse trying to take it off. The good thing is that we basically got all of it off, bad news is that I still have a dining room to go through as well. Oh and another bad thing I found, some of the floor was damaged by termites. So it looks like I will have to replace some pieces through out the floor. Guess I will have to salvage pieces from the back room .


This is what the floor looked like in the living room, nasty ole carpet with stains and all.

This was my first attempt at breaking through the piece of sh*t linoleum.

Giving the floors a shellacking!

I hope no one read the title and thought I was giving my floors a beating. Instead I am thinking about shellacking my floors. I have read a whole lot on this and have met some people that have actually used shellac on their floors. The advantages of shellac is: 1. it is faster drying, so you don't have to wait days for poly to dry and then turn around to see that their are dust particle or footprints in them, 2. it's easier to fix and I have 5 dogs and 3 cats, so I know I will be fixing a lot (don't want to sand my floors every yr), 3. it is non-toxic, so I don't have to worry about the zoo eating something off the floor or licking it.

Now the disadvantages: 1. It will mess up if alcohol is put on it, also if water is sitting on it (but from what I have read, water will not mess up the dewaxed version), 2. It easily damages (but of course it is easily fixed as well).

So from looking at these, I think that I can handle the disadvantages and I will try out the shellac. I will go with the garnet because I want dark floors. Hopefully I can get some from shellac.net in the near future, but I am told that they are out of garnet as of right now. If anyone has used shellac on their floors please comment on how you liked it. I would love to read more on this.

Peel Away part deaux

After using Peel Away on the siding and having sub-par results, I decided to use it on one of my upstairs windows sills and on the top of my columns (still don't know what it is called). This time though, I let it sit there for days, I had to make sure that none of it dried and after a few days I jump in and began to scrape. Well my observation was that it worked a lot better this time. The paper still didn't bring any paint up, but the paint was all gooey looking and came off pretty easily. You should see the amount and different color paints the previous PO's used. So now I am happy with my Peel Away (at first I thought I waste 30 some dollars on crap). So now I have used Peel Away, Soy Gel and common stripper from Home Depot. From my experience, Soy Gel seemed to work better and faster, plus it didn't nuke my hand like the other 2. I may have to try Peel Away 7, because that is non burning. So I guess that will be in another update later on. Something I did find, was that I hear that Peel Away 1 casuses the would to turn a darker color, but I didn't experience that at all. Maybe because you have to wait a couple days or something, but so far same colored wood. Anyways I will have to update pictures later. Now off to project #64373734224562 finishing the sanding of my floors, so that I can finally shellac the thing and not worry about it. You know people always say to do one project at a time, but I can't seem to stop jumping around. Hope I actually finish something soon. Well I did get the A/C and Heat done... of course I didn't do and still have to pay for that. Oh well, the house is calling.

More pictures of the sanded floor (and may the force be with you)

Here are some other pictures of the floors, for some reason they would not upload when I posted the first message. Anyways, I thought I had a before picture, but now I can't find it. Oh well, but it was a drastic change. Well here are the pictures:


Here is the master bedroom floors after all the hard work of sanding. As you can see there are some areas that the sander would not get to. Guess that's where the ole sweat work comes in handy.


The hallways leading to the master bedroom. I officially hate paint and gray painted substances.


Here I am inhaling massive amounts of lead paint and wood fibers. Kids: Say No To Lead!



Here is a little preview of what the floors looked like before. I had a better one but can't seem to find it anymore.


Here is what happened to me after inhaling all of the lead paint and wood fibers. For some reason I turned into Darth Vader and my pals turned into a bee, giraffe, and catwoman, I think.

Got bored, so I sanded my floors!

Well this past weekend I sanded the floors in the master bedroom and the ahllway upstairs. Lita had been bugging me for about 2 weeks to sand the hallway floors, because she didn't want the dogs eating anything off the floor. So on Saturday I decided to trek over to the local Home Depot and rent me a drum sander. Mind you I have never used a drum sander before and was very scared of it, but I did get to watch a neighbor of mine (Derek) use one and it didn't seem to hard. What I wanted to do is not take off too much because I wanted to keep it dark looking and old. So anyways, I went to drive to the Home Depot only to be greeted with massive traffic, with my luck I had forgotten it was the week of Florida-Georgia, the biggest outdoor cocktail party. But I still drudged forward and got there. First of all the drum sander is the heaviest thing I have ever lifted. I thought my 30-some inch tv was heavy, but this thing was like a friggin building. Well I got it home dragged it upstairs and started the bad boy up, I did my Our Fathers and set it down the first time. It went right to work and took off the paint and grime right off. I was happy! So after about 10 hours I had pretty much sanded the floors in the room and the hallway. The only bad thing was that the floors must not be too level, because there were areas where the sander didn't even touch it. I guess I will have to go over that with a hand sander and try to smooth it out. I'm not to worried though I want to give it that old home look, so if it's a little unlevel then oh well. Also I have decided to shellac the floor and see how that turns out, heard that it is easier to fix than poly (I have 5 dogs and 3 cats, I'm sure I will be fixing a lot). Well anyways here are the pictures over the weekend and maybe some other things as well:



Here is the hallway after the first pass


Here is the hallway after quite a few more.