How It Feels When Hard Work Starts to Pay Off
Rebuilding a Beautiful, Vacant Historic Detroit Home (Episode 26)
Floor Staining Time
We left off last week with our perfectly sanded floors. After replacing some of our missing oak flooring that was water damaged as well as filling in places where we had changed the layout of the home, it was finally time to see some color! Our flooring contractors started from the 3rd floor, working down to the first with stain. We’d decided to go with a slightly reddish color and on our staircase, we’d learned that our stairs were made of two different kinds of wood and had been stained two contrasting colors. We decided to do the same again and chose a darker color to make the treads and curved aspects of our stairs pop like they would have originally.
Disaster Strikes
After putting our first coat of polyurethane on all three floors, we noticed a big problem on our first floors. We aren’t sure exactly what caused it, but we had strange marbling of the color of the stain on the first floor. Some spots were very bright red and others very brown. Even though all of the floors were the same type and quality of wood, we realized that almost every room on the main floor had some major coloring issues with the stain.
Our flooring contractor was furious with himself, having clearly messed up some part of the staining process on this floor. They’ve now re-sanded the first floor back down in order to redo all of the staining again to get it perfect. After the re-stain then they will start again with polyurethane coating on the floors. A total of 3 coats will be put on the floors with light sanding in between coats until the surface is smooth. It’s put a slight bump in our timeline, but we’re glad that they’ll be perfect once completed.
Cabinets are finished!
The biggest news of this week is that our custom cabinets are finally finished! We received a call from Michael Schlabach, our Amish Cabinet-Maker, letting us know that they were ready to install our cabinets. Being all the way in Amish Country in Ohio, we couldn’t go to see them easily, so Brandon’s family who live near Amish Country went to visit the Schlabach’s and take some pictures for us of the finished cabinets so we could see them!
Seeing these for the first time in real life is so exciting! The Schlabachs did such an incredible job matching the sketches that I gave them for what we wanted. The Baking Station is especially impressive. When I was sketching out the “appliance garage,” I was really trying to find the best solution for the doors to stow out of the way. I wanted to make sure that I could leave the doors open all of the time if I really wanted to, so keeping the doors out of the way was a must. It took weeks of thought and sketching to finally come up with the idea of having doors that both bi-folded and slid back inside the cabinet to keep them out of the way. When we proposed the idea to Michael, he simply responded, “Well, we’ve never done that before, but we can figure it out!” It’s truly an incredible feat of engineering that they’ve done in order to make my sketch a reality and still have the ability to put little shelves inside even with the bi-fold and slide doors.
We’re so excited to get these things installed in our home. We can’t thank them enough for the incredible about of hardwork, mental math, and engineering that went into many of these pieces. I can’t wait to see our bathroom vanity now, which the Schlabachs are also building for us out of real walnut. We’re hoping to get our cabinetry installed in a few weeks once tile and flooring is complete.
While they were there, Michael gave Brandon’s family a mini-tour of his home and garden near the cabinet shop, and made sure they left with a large batch of fresh fruits and veggies to take home.
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