Finally finished with before and after shots.

Well it took me all day yesterday, but I finished putting on the 4th coat of poly last night in the wee mornings and when I woke up today it was all dry. I don't know how soon I can put furniture on the floors but I will wait a couple days just in case.

Before:

During:

After:

Baby Room Floor Refinishing, Priceless!

9" Disposable Roller Tray: $1.98

10" Waterborne Applicator: $7.46

Clear Varathane Water Based Polyurethane: $46.26

Finishing the shellacked floor for your new baby room...... Pricel..... $59.60

For everything else there's Lowes.

Well this is still only 2 coats so far. I have about 3 more to go, but putting the poly on is not that hard at all. With the applicator it goes on real smooth and dries very quickly.

Exterior before and after

I don't think I ever posted any pictures of my before and after for the exterior of the house. I actually finished this last year mostly by myself. I did need help with the very top rafter tails, but everything else I hand sanded, primed and painted.

Before: A couple months after we bought our house. It was painted half cream/pink and the other half just bare ass wood. It doesn't look too bad here, but the sides were mostly bare wood. Scraping and sanding this off took me near 2 years to complete.

During: Here is the fron mostly sanded to complete bare wood. As you can see the original color of the house was green, so we decided to keep it green, but a lighter green.



After: Here is the house tonight. I just went outside and quickly took a picture while it was getting dark. The house is back to it's green and it took me the whole summer last year to completely painting it. As I said before I did have to pay some one to go up top and paint the rafter tails. The colors I used were Benjamin Moore Saybrook Sage for the house, Antique White for the trim and Bryant Gold for the trim. It's a little hard to see the gold but it's there.

What host do you use for wordpress?

I am thinking of putting my blog on wordpress with my one domain name. I was wondering since a lot of you use wordpress, what host do you use for your blog? I know there is a free wordpress, but I want to be able to configure how the site looks. So I need a good host. I have heard about bluehost and gatorhost, but I don't know anyone that uses them.

What's wrong with houseblogs?

Is anyone else seeing Home Restoration's blog posts showing on the latest entries list 50 million times? I just thought that it was weird seeing that many posts for the last few days. I'm assuming there is some kind of glitch because when I view his posts they are all dated in the past. Just weird.

Sail Jacksonville!

This weekend May 29-31 is Sail Jacksonville. It's an event where replica tall ships come to our riverfront in downtown. The events include tours of the ships, live entertainment, a pirate battle and of course fireworks. If you are in the Jacksonville area, I encourage you to come out this weekend to enjoy the festivities. Oh, and it is free. (except the beer)

The Government wants to paint my roof white?

I just read where the government wants to paint roofs white in the US. Now I'm sure they only mean buildings with flat tarred roofs, but I couldn't stop to think what my house would look like with a white roof. Shoot I got some leaks going on, so if the government wants to paint my roof white for free then I am all for it. It was a good read and made me wonder if white roofs would make a big difference for the environment.

My pitiful office

While I was painting the baby room, I started thinking of all the great times I had in there.
This was of course, the room we slept in and ate and cooked for a few years. Now everything has moved out. Now I have a master bedroom (though still cluttered). I have a family room (which also is cluttered). But at the very least this room was my office, it had my computer and other gadgets in it, plus the dogs were always there.

Now this is what has happened to my office, yes that's right. It is in the upstairs hallway, right in front of the stairs. As you can see it looks pretty neat. Haha. Anyways I am typing here thinking, damn I downgraded, but it's all for the little dude.






I just wanted to show the awesome heating system we had at the time.

Shellacking is done

Well I finished shellacking the floors and they came out very nice. Even though the new wood and old wood don't match, I'm not going to cry over it. Now I have to wait to put down the poly, which I will probably do next weekend when I can get some from my local paint store.

Question: what brands of poly have people used? And how good were they?

Before:










After:

Shellacking the final upstairs bedroom

Well yesterday I was removing the flooring from the downstairs room and today I am shellacking the last upstairs room. I know I know, I never finish what I start, but I'm the type of renovator that likes to do a little here and a little there. I know there are some of you like that out there, I read your blogs. Anyways I finished sanding the floors with a palm sander, vacuumed and cleaned the area as good as possible and started to put shellac on the baby room floor. Did I saw baby room.... YES! I am going to be a daddy in 7-8 months. So I need to finish this room as fast as possible. I know I haven't blogged in like ages and now all of a sudden I am a soon to be dad and blogging away. I guess that is how it works sometimes. But here are some pictures of the shellac on wood.

You can kind of see in the picture that part of the floor has a different tone. That is where the previous owners put down new pine next to the old. As you can tell they don't match up very well, but I am going to see if a few more coats of shellac might blend it in better. Then after that I will poly over it. I know most poeple don't like poly, but my wife insists that it have poly on it this time. So whatever wife says, I do. While this waits to dry I will be making more shellac.

RAM in the rain

Can anyone guess what this is???

If someone said the Riverside Arts Market, then you are CORRECT!

Now what is so special about RAM?? Well it's just you same ole art and craft market, except that it is held every Saturday uner I-95. Yes I do mean the highway I-95. The space under this bridge has always been wasted space, but the city finally finshed paving and renovating the space. I always wonder what they could put in there but never imagined an art and craft market. Anyways this market has been a huge success and it only started about a month ago and it keeps getting better. Though it did rain while we were there, the bridge gives enough rain shedding to walk most of the area without getting wet. Check this out if your in Jacksonville on a Saturday morning.

Wierd find under the floors... and rot

I am in the process of redoing the old downstairs room, which was originally a kitchen. To start off I had to pull up all the old original floors because they were in such bad shape (alot of rot from a former leak I presume). Anyways while I ripped up the plywood to get to the original floor, I found what looks like old linoleum and newspaper bits. It was kind of weird to see the newspaper, the linoleum had a 1950's design on it.

You can see the small newspaper piece in the second photo, there wasn't much left of it, so no telling how old it is. I assume that it was put down and then the linoleum on top. Anyways it's pretty cool to see.

The other thing I found was lots of rot. Some of the floor boards were pretty wrotten, but most was still in useable shape. I will have to put some piece of plywood in its place and then put big sheets of plywood on top.

Rain or Shine, Jacksonville Jazz Fest will go on

Well it has been raining not stop for the past few days here in Jacksonville. Unfortunately the Jacksonville Jazz Festival also starts up this weekend. It is set up for the first time in downtown Jax. If you look at the picture of my logo, they were suppose to set up in the park along with the street next to it. Because of the rain they had to move all the stage indoors. I sure hope that the rest of the weekend is a bright sun shiny day or there may not be a jazz fest in downtown next year. Anyways for anyone in Jacksonville, I would encourage you to come and join the festivities.