For this week’s addition of the Sugar Maple Weekly Updates, we are a little discombobulated here on the farm. We are living in our barn space {HERE} while the main floors in our home are being refinished. Some other little projects are happening too and I’m excited to show you all of them so let’s get started.
Why are we doing this?
During this week of Sugar Maple Weekly Updates we are finally doing something I’ve been dreaming about! Refinishing the floors in our home has been something I wanted to do since at least the second month we lived here. All the floors throughout our home are dark, like black dark. And while I think that look is beautiful and very elegant, it does not really fit with our life here on the farm and has never really fit with the house either. They are very difficult to keep clean, show every little speck of dust and they were so shiny and monotone that I even thought they looked fake when we first came to see the house.
The floors on the main level of our home, the stairs and the second story are all different. None of them are original. When our house was remodeled in 2017 before we bought it, the previous owners added a huge wing and changed all the flooring. According to my contractor, once they saw how dark the main level floors were, they changed the floors upstairs. My upstairs floors are still dark, but you can see the grain in the wood. Since those rooms are also smaller, it is easier to cover the darkness with different area rugs. The downstairs ones were the ones that really bothered me because they were just so dark and shiny.
Main floor refinishing only
We have been looking into doing this for several years and have had lots of quotes for everything from refinishing to replacing the floors. The issues with replacing them all so they are all the same is that 1. It feels really wasteful to me. and 2. All the floor boards are glued to my sub-flooring. Pulling them up would ruin that as well. 3. Lastly, changing everything or refinishing everything is extremely costly. My upstairs wood would have to be hand-scrapped and cost $15,000 by themselves. My stairs are oak and usually you need a painter to come in and refinish stairs. That would have cost another $8,000. So at the end of the day, I decided to just refinish our main floor floors. They were the ones that bothered me the most and they would be the least costly for us to change.
Main floor material
The main story floors are Brazilian Hardwood. I honestly had never heard of this type of flooring (we had oak in our previous home) and I have no idea why the previous homeowners went with this versus something that was more local. This came pre-finished but was not engineered hardwood. It is real wood. Here is our before and what it looks like so far!
Casing project and French Doors
While the floors have been happening, I added on three other small projects that were just things I had been wanting to change and had been wishing for. They included adding French Doors to my Library {HERE} and adding casing to the openings into the family room.
Library doors
The library doors I wanted for two reasons. 1. I thought they would make that side of the house look a little nicer and a little more finished. The library space is original to our home and the old formal living room for the house. It is 124 years old. More than likely, there was a door here once upon a time. 2. I needed to find a way to keep Daisy out of the room when I wasn’t in it. She likes making a mess in that room overnight. No, she doesn’t have any problems like a bladder infection or anything. She just refuses to hold it overnight. She also tends to be overprotective. Any time someone walks up to the house she runs to that room and attacks the window. I’ve tried gates, she goes through them. The doors seemed to be a way to handle two things at once.
You can see the doors in the second photo below. In the first photo, you can see they are the same doors as my office doors. I feel like this pulls the house together a bit.
Casing
With the casing, I just thought it would again make the house look more finished. The whole family room, dining space and kitchen are part of the home addition that went on in 2017. While the house looks great from the outside, on the inside I often feel like you can see the complete difference in the space by the layout – big and open versus smaller rooms and more closed off. I’m hoping some of these little touches will help to blend the two a bit more and add back some of the character that has been lost over the century of home renovations that have been done here.
The two doorways with the casing are in each of the photos below.
Countertop replacement
Last but not least, we replaced the countertop in the space we use as the coffee bar. This space was one of those odd desk spaces in the home and we have never been a fan of those spaces. In my last house I pulled it out and had a tall cabinet built for extra storage. Here, we haven’t rebuilt the space but we did use it as a coffee bar versus a workspace.
The original butcher block counter just did not workout well. It started to warp and lift away from the cabinets underneath. We replaced it with quartz, which is the same as the rest of our kitchen. I’m not sure how I feel about the loss of the warmth in the countertop, especially when looking at the warm bricks, but I know in the long run this will work better for us.
Kevin plans to build some shelving under this now in the space for the chair to store additional coffee, tea and mugs. That will help to fully transform the space from desk to a truly functional area. This is right across from our pantry so the space works as an open butler’s pantry too. Also, I’m sorry about how messy this looks. None of these photos are staged or even set up in the way that we would use them. The house is a work zone right now.
Other things
Randomly, I’ve started some work on seedlings this week too but I will update on that next week. This week has been a lot with all of us living in the barn space and this project.
Luck of the Irish
With St. Patrick’s Day this weekend, don’t forget to check out these recipes!
- My Irish Soda Bread {HERE} – One of my most popular recipes!
- Recipe for Cottage Pie {HERE}
- Guinness Irish Stew with Braised Beef {HERE}
- Traditional Irish Scones with Clotted Cream {HERE}
- Potato Leek Soup {HERE}
- Irish Apple Cake – Kerry Cake {HERE}
- Bailey’s Chocolate Cake {HERE}
In case you missed it…
I’m including a few of the most recent posts here in my Sugar Maple Weekly Updates in case you missed them! Being out of the kitchen this week, I haven’t been about to cook, but I have added in a lot of the content from the West Michigan Home and Garden Show! Here is everything:
- DIY Terracotta Pots
- Growing a Food Forest {HERE}
- Tips for growing tomatoes from seeds {HERE}
- How to plant a Kitchen Herb Garden {HERE}
Any Questions?
That’s it for this week! Let me know if you have any questions below or if there is anything you would like to know about in next week’s Sugar Maple Weekly Updates. Have a lovely week, friends.
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