getting in on the ground floor

Since my brother and I were very young our family has always had a 'do it yourself' attitude but from the second I pulled up the carpets in my house I knew I would have to get a professional in to refinish them. I wanted to get them done before I started moving in so on Wednesday of last week I had a company come in and by Friday morning my floors looked like this... (if you scroll down to some early entries you can see the before images)

So I finally have a room I can walk in with no shoes on (two actually, the living room and dining room) I also finally picked out a medicine chest and looked at tile for the bathroom floor. Lowes actually has some great marble tile on sale for ~3.50 a square foot as well as other nice tile for ~1.50 a square foot and considering my bathroom is only about 80 square feet it will be very affordable to put nice tile or even marble on the floor!

Other events this weekend included a light being installed in the 2nd bedroom and a light being installed above the bathroom sink. There was also more paint stripped off of the fireplace, and look who was home to help rip out the stupid asbestos gas insert!

Last, but certainly not least, in something I should probably put in a separate entry entitled "home ownership isn't all fun and games" or "why people bitch about being homeowners" Dad and I spent a sizable amount of time this weekend in the basement fixing (patching together) my boiler.

The short story basically goes - the boiler system was broken, we fixed it. But the long story goes..

I've been keeping the heat down because I'm not at the house full time yet but to refinish the floors the heat had to be turned up to help the finish dry properly. This was the beginning of the end for my 50 year old boiler. On Saturday morning Dad went to the basement to find the pump motor had seized up and the pressure relief valve leaking like a sieve. The boiler itself was still working just fine (even if it is only 50% efficient or so to start with) but without the pump to circulate water and the valve leaking precious hot water all over the basement floor my heating system was in sad shape. This sets the scene for Sunday night... Dad and I tore the pump motor apart and rebuilt it on Sunday morning then went to the Steeler game... (GO STEELERS!!) Then after the game we went down to Monongahela to fix the leaky valve and put the pump motor back. We turned off all the water and power to the boiler and started to remove the faulty valve. I turned the valve with a big pipe wrench while Dad stood by ready with a plug for the pipe. As soon as I lifted the valve three stories worth of water pressure from all the radiators in the house shot a stream of water out of the pipe all the way to the ceiling before Dad could even get close with the plug, water (at least it was nice and warm) got just about everywhere but nothing disastrous.

Luckily I was planning to replace the boiler so before this whole ordeal even started I already had 3 quotes for a new boiler.. awesome.

Alright, that's it for this entry, next time expect some pictures of a finished bathroom and maybe even a bed in the bedroom.