Tarmigan Acacia: Remodeling Adventures

We have currently been remodeling different parts of our house, well not really different parts as much as just the downstairs. The house we're living in now is in a nice neighborhood in Pocatello. It is not our dream home and probably will never be. I know that sounds super negative we like our house and neighborhood, just wish we had a little more space around us. But we are figuring out what kind of style we should add to the very 90s house. We moved here in 2012 and have not done too much updating until this year. When we first moved into the house we spent most of our remodeling money on replacing the furnace and water heater and although we would have liked to replace the carpets immediately we have only just put in hardwood floors on the main level this year. And as simple as that should have been, we ran into a few issues as we tried to get it done.

(this is what it looked like before)

We bought bamboo flooring from Lumber Liquidators and planned on installing it ourselves little did we know that bamboo floors are one of the hardest floors to install but we only discovered this after we had already bought it and phil had already taken our carpets out. So we decided to schedule someone to come and install it for us. They were booked for a whole month and so we scheduled for the floors to be installed June 6th. Then they canceled on us June 3rd. We had to hire someone else and they were booked until July 5th.

(Phil taking out the carpets)

(Jett was our little helper, I know it's blurry but just look at where he keeps his hammer)

While we were waiting for that, Phil decided to retile the kitchen but as he ripped the tile out of the kitchen he discovered that our dishwasher had been leaking since we replaced it in November. So we decided to do an insurance claim. It took the restoration guys several weeks to dry out the subfloor and get rid of all of the mold under the cabinets before installing the new tile and they had to rebuild the cabinets as well. Unfortunately they did not break the countertop so I was not able to replace the countertop as part of the insurance claim. It was kind of a good thing our dishwasher leaked because our drain pipe was cracked and probably was cracked before we moved in so that had been slowly leaking for a few years. We got all of that fixed and now know we don't have any mold or anything anywhere.

( drying out the subfloor, and this is the section of cabinets they had to rebuild when they were done drying it out.)

We learned a lot from the insurance claim and how we should have done it. If we had known what we know now we probably could have gotten a whole new (relocated) kitchen, and have made the money go a lot farther than what it was used for, but guess you learn through experience. Long story short we planned to replace floors in March, and ripped out all the carpet March 16th. But only got them installed July 5th.

After the floors were installed we were gone alot through July and August. Between work, family vacations, and High adventure, Phil was only home for a few days. And so we just got base boards put in two weeks ago.