DIY Hardwood Flooring

So, in my last post I put a teaser of what was to come in our household. I was so sick of carpet I told my husband that I wanted hardwood. It took us a while to find what we wanted because of the finish on hardwood floors. Almost all prefinished hardwood is finished with Aluminum Oxide, and I didn't want that. So we contacted a flooring place and the nice lady was able to point us in the right direction. I tend to be very chemically sensitive, and was concerned with what I had been reading about aluminum oxide. Just so you know, it is very hard to find prefinished hardwood with a polyurethane only finish. We ended up with one from Bruce. And we LOVE it!! We've had it now for a few months and there are a couple of scratches, but that's not surprising with three kids, a dog, and two cats, as well as a couple of occasional clumsy adults :)

Let me tell you, it was a process. First you have to prep your floors. So we needed to rip out the carpet, and padding. It was pretty gross. We have lived in this house for eight years and we have been known to spill a glass or two of whatever, but what was really disgusting, was the saturated nastiness living in the padding under areas where we have had furniture sitting for the past eight years, so we know it was from the previous owners. Yuck. Who knows what that was...

Next we needed to take out all of the staples from the subfloor. That wasn't fun. I was better at it than my husband (now that I think about it, his inability to remove them quickly was probably intentional), so that was my job, which in case you're wondering, the best tool for the job was the corner of a pry bar, hubby had been using pliers. We also needed to scrape off the padding that was seemingly glued to the subfloor, hubby had that nasty job. When all of that was done, we brought in the shop vac and cleaned everything up.

Next we needed to see how level the floor was. We were only allowed a small variance in the floor per the manufacturers instructions. Shockingly, and luckily, we were pretty spot on for the whole floor.

When we had carpet, there were certain areas of the floor that felt a little soggy under foot. That is really the best way I can describe it. It almost felt like the subfloor may have had some water damage and was rotting, so we were curious as to what we might find when we removed the carpet. We had checked the flooring from underneath (basement ceiling), and didn't see anything amiss. When we looked closer after removal of the carpet we found out what was really going on. Apparently over time, the glue used to hold plywood together starts to un-stick itself. So the sort of springy feeling was subfloor separating. Yay! Easy fix. We purchased another sheet, stuck it in and called it a day.

Before we started laying the floor, we decided to paint and de-squeak our house. My husband said he thinks our house was built on a giant squeak toy because of the insane level of squeakiness. So, he went a little crazy with the screwing down of the subfloor, but it was needed. Fast forward a few months, and we are still squeak free.

When we received our flooring they gave us something called asphalt paper (I think that's what it was called), to lay on top of the subfloor, and under the hardwood. we unrolled that stuff, and I took one whiff, and said "NO WAY!!" It smelled just like asphalt (duh). I'd rather not have my home smelling like a construction site, and besides, who knows what kind of issues you'd have constantly breathing that stuff in..no thanks. We decided to lay down rosin paper instead.

Finally it was time to lay down the wood...

 

What do you think? Better, right?

The Year of the Pest

OK. So you know how I haven't been very frequent in posting? Well here's the reason why, but I use the words exhausting/exhausted a lot because that is exactly what it was...

I'm going to admit something I probably shouldn't. But I'm gonna keep it real. This Spring/Summer, we have had some issues with pests. At the beginning of Spring, we had termites in our raised bed. We got rid of the wood, and all of the soil, which was beautiful soil, but I was scared that it was full of termites, so it had to go.

The next pest was ants. Do you remember the post on how to get rid of ants naturally? Well it worked to a certain extent, but they ants were plentiful, so I had to use something a bit more powerful than cinnamon and oranges. I didn't want to spray my yard because of the kids and the dog playing in the backyard, so I used Ortho Home Defense Max Ant Bait. At first it didn't seem like it was working (I only gave it two days), but then it started raining, and continued raining for a few days. When all was dry, there were no more ants. Whoo Hoo!

After the ants, the pests started coming inside. The new pests were mice! Oh my goodness, I thought I was gonna lose my mind at this point (little did I know what was to come). My cats started hanging out in the kitchen in front of us, which is unusual because they aren't allowed in the kitchen. I'm sure when we leave the house they probably hang out in there, but that's neither here nor there :) Anyway they would lay around staring at the sink cabinets. I wasn't sure why they were doing it until one day I found it...nasty, disgusting, mouse poop. Eww!! So I told hubby to lay out some traps. We had some wooden ones because when the weather starts to change we have had a mouse or two come in the house in the past. Well hubby set them up with peanut butter and the next morning the mouse had come and eaten the peanut butter off the trap! Not cheese, peanut butter! That mouse had some time to sit there for a while, so apparently those traps were a joke. Now we had to find another solution. I was talking to my sister in law who has the same problem with seasonal mice, and she said not to use glue traps. After talking to her I decided glue traps are definately not the way to go. The following story is gross so stop reading now until you see END OF STORY again...you have been warned. Anyway, she said one time she put down glue traps and when she came down the next morning she found a mouse who had chewed off his own foot. END OF STORY. So that was 'nuff said on that. After a little bit of research we found that people said to use Ortho Home Defense Max Press and Set traps. It comes with two traps. We bought three packs. We set two packs up and no kidding in about 10 minutes we heard it go off. We were happy that we caught the mouse and disposed of it quickly. About an hour later we heard another one go off. So we caught another one. Later that evening we caught another one. When all was said and done we caught six mice! Needless to say, after catching that many we bought more traps and set them up. We haven't caught anymore and there is no more mouse poop. Thank goodness!

I have saved the worst for last. The final pests we got were....wait for it......................fleas. Seriously, if you have never had this problem, pray that you never do. If you have had them, continue praying that they never return. Wow. Now, I have always associated fleas with filth, so I was not happy to have these disgusting things in my not filthy house. I don't know where they came from. We have been living in our home for eight years. The first couple of summers we put flea meds on our dog. But then we stopped because one summer we just never bought it and he never got fleas. So for the last five years our dog has not had flea meds. Early spring our cat started losing fur on her back, by her tail. We took her to the vet and the vet said fleas. She looked for them using that little flea comb, but didn't find anything. We said, "How can she have fleas? She's an indoor cat. We have another cat and a dog and they aren't having any issues". She basically said,"Just put flea meds on them". We didn't. They gave us steroids and we called it finished. A couple months later the same issue started. We took her back to the vet. Another round of steroids and this time I bought Frontline from Sam's Club and thought it was finished. When it happened a third time I told the vet we used Frontline and she asked if we purchased it from a vet or a store. I told her a store and she said that was bad. The meds at the store aren't the same as the vet. Even FRONTLINE. I was so mad. So we bought the stuff from the vet and came home. Then it happened...July 2. I saw one in my family room. Then I saw one on my shirt, then my daughter saw one on her bed. Eeeek! How is this happening? Well, obviously I know how, but what am I supposed to do? Again I didn't want to use any sprays so I got to work. I started vaccuuming everyday, twice a day and throwing the stuff from the vacuum away outside. I stripped every bed and washed everything. Then I went extreme. I took every washable cloth out of every inch of our house and washed it. I am not exaggerating when I say that was at least 100 loads. Luckily there was not a major issue with them in our upstairs. But we did have them on our main level and our basement, which is plenty!

I was so upset about this. I did intense cleaning every single day for about two weeks. Now that may not sound so awful but think about what this entails. Imagine moving every bit of furniture in your house every single day twice a day and sometimes three times a day. It was exhausting. I lost 10 pounds. As much as I was happy about losing that weight, I was not happy by the way the weight was lost. Add to this that my kids don't like to sleep, which means I get no sleep and a meltdown is coming soon. Finally one day I called my husband at work sobbing and said "I can't take this anymore, I don't know what to do! Can you please come home? I need to take a nap!!!"

When I finally got some sleep I could think a little more clearly and started researching the best way to get rid of fleas...naturally. Again I didn't want to use any sort of chemicals. Every thing I read said use baking soda or salt. So I sprinkled baking soda all over the carpet and left it there over night, I also put down aluminum pie pans filled with soapy water by night lights. The next morning I looked in the pans and found a couple of fleas, and I vacuumed up the baking soda and didn't see anything for about four hours. Then I saw one again. When this happened I lost it. I couldn't take it anymore. So I decided, if we're going to do this, we're going to do it once and get it over with. The solution? Salt. Seriously. Salt. I went to Sam's Club and bought probably about 30 lbs of salt. I put it in my food processor and turned it into powder and started sprinkling all of my carpet. With this process you have to leave it on your carpet for 2 weeks. At this point my kids ages were 4 and 18 months. What was I supposed to do about keeping little kids off the carpet? I had to leave every single day and stay out ALL day, which is not typical in this household. It was exhausting. Every morning I loaded everyone up and immediately drove to my mom's house to give the kids breakfast. My mom works, so she gave us a key and we would hang out there for a while. But my kids turned into different people when we were there. They would not listen to me at all. So then we started doing things outside of her house. I had to be sort of creative to keep them busy for two weeks. This also meant no naps. Which worked well for me at bedtime because I could get them to bed earlier and easier.

Anyway, long story short, that got rid of most of them. After vacuuming up everything we didn't see anything for about a week, but I guess they must have been in the pupae stage and hatched. So we did round two of salt. This time we also purchased Bayer Advanced to spray the yard and took our pets to the vet to get put on Comfortis. The vet wasn't very happy about this, but we needed to take some drastic actions to rid ourselves of these things. So here is what we did to FINALLY get rid of them...Sprayed the front yard with Bayer Advanced bug killer, gave our pets Advantix (dog) and Advantage (cat), two weeks later gave them Comfortis, two weeks later Advantix and Advantage again, and two weeks later Comfortis again. Cut our grass as short as our lawn mower could go, salted the carpet for four weeks, and washed every bit of fabric in our house. The Bayer Advanced was used in the front yard because it is shaded, but the backyard is full sun, so cutting the grass short is all we needed to do there. Oh my goodness, it was awful and exhausting.

After all of this was said and done, I found myself disgusted with carpet. To know that those horrible creatures could live in carpet so easily made me hate carpet so this is what happened next...

This was our next project of the summer. Uggh...I'm getting exhausted just looking at these pictures. This was a big under taking. But more on that later...

Strawberry Jam

In June we went to pick our own strawberries. Let me tell you, if you've never eaten a strawberry straight from the field warmed by the sun, you've never eaten! Yum!!! Anyway, what to do with all those strawberries? Strawberry jam of course. We also froze a lot for smoothies and homemade ice cream, but made jam straight away. I've never made homemade jam before, but it was really easy, and I learned a lot about jam, well, strawberry jam anyway.

After I made it, I was reading online about home canning and botulism. I started to second guess my canning, and was scared to eat the jam. Which was stupid because I grew up eating home canned goods my entire life.  But, in situations like this, I did what I always do, which is research the heck out of it. I also talked to my father in law who makes jellies and jams all the time. He said he never worries about anything like that because of the sugar content. I didn't think sugar acted as a preservative, but apparently it does. I am not a scientist, but from what I could gather, large amounts of sugar acts similarly to salt in the fact that it sucks the water out of bacteria. If bacteria doesn't have water, it can't grow. So essentially, it kills the bacteria. Also, strawberries are acidic. According to this site for safe canning (as in a water bath) foods are considered acidic if they have a pH lower than 4.6, the lower the pH, the more acidic it is. Strawberries have a pH of 3.0-3.9. So, if you've ever been concerned about that, now you know it's ok to eat your jam!

Anyway, I used the recipe from The Pioneer Woman. It is delicious, however I think next time I will cut the added lemon down to 2 tablespoons, or eliminate it altogether. I also want to try to use apples as the pectin next time. The powdered stuff claims it is derived from apples anyway, so why not just use apples? I'll try it some day and see how it goes. If I ever do, I'll be sure to let you know!

Cook up some biscuits and load it up with jam and butter. Yum! You're welcome :)

Straw Bale Gardening Continued

I am horrible at posting new things. This has been a crazy summer. So much has been going on. The last time I posted I mentioned about straw bale gardening. Then things got crazy...more on that later. But first, I'll continue with the straw bale experience. It was awesome!

When doing research about straw bales, I couldn't find any information about if chemicals are in the straw bales. We wanted to do organic gardening and I didn't know if the wheat had been treated with anything, or if it had would the chemicals leach into our vegetables. Since I never found the answer to that question, I was in search of organic straw bales. Now, if you ever decide to search for that, give it up now. What you need to search for is organic wheat farmers. That is when I found what I was looking for. I called the farm and sure enough they had straw bales that they use for their animals, and sell them to other farmers for their animal bedding. Anyway, if you ever need that bit of information, you're welcome :)

So, when you get the bales home, you have to condition them. This process takes about two weeks. The point of this is to start the decomposition proccess. In order to accomplish this, you have to use high amounts of nitrogen. You can use conventional nitrogen, but we used fish emulsion. For normal fertilizing, you need something like 1-2 tablespoons, for the amount of nitrogen we needed, I think we used 5-6 tablespoons. It worked well. The bales reached the desired temperature on schedule. Now, just to let you know, the bales went crazy with mushrooms. Mushrooms are a good sign because it lets you know the bale is decomposing, however, with three curious little kiddos, any mushroom growing in my garden makes me nervous. From some of the research that I did, I'm pretty sure they were Inky mushrooms, and are edible. Now, I didn't try them out so don't hold me to that. I am not a mushroomologist :) I still made sure my kids didn't go near the bales when there was any sign of mushrooms or slime mold. Once the bales reached the desired temperature, it was time to plant.

When  you plant, you need to split the bale a little bit and drop some clean soil into the bale. Then just stick your plant in. If you're planting from seed, you just place a layer of soil on top of the bale and place the seeds into the soil. We covered ours with some netting to keep hungry birds from taking our little seeds. When our seeds started sprouting, we removed the netting. After that, things took off. We had plenty to get us through the season, and canned a few jars of tomatoes, but next year we plan to make the garden significantly larger. I love it because you don't have to worry about the pests like you have with a traditional garden, so you really have no need for chemicals. We didn't use anything for our garden. However, our garden was full of beneficial bugs. We had some pretty massive spiders and spider webs, and they took care of plenty of bugs. There were ladybugs, ants, and we put some worms in there too when the bales started decomposing.

All in all, it was a great crop. We are very happy with our results. So next year hopefully we can get enough food to get us through most of the winter. I want to try to start growing enough food so that we won't have to buy anything like that from the grocery store. For example my father in law plants more than 100 bean seeds, we planted 36. He gets enough to get them to the next summer, we had enough to get us through the summer.  I also talked to a farmer at our local farmer's market and asked them if they would sell us their "grade b" tomatoes for canning. They said "can you pick?" We said yes, but unfortunately never got to go get them. So that is still an idea for next year. I would like to do something like that for corn since we don't have enough room to grow corn. Hopefully we can find a farmer that will let us pick our own.

Anyway, at the end of the season, the bales really start to shrink down due to decomposing, great for the compost bin!

 

 

If you're interested in your own straw bale garden, there is plenty of information out there. We actually purchased the book, but there is information online about it. This is a great thing to do if you are limited on space, have poor soil, or don't feel like dealing with raised beds. So next Spring, get some straw bales and try it out. I don't see how you can really fail with this system.

 

Straw Bale Garden

My husband and I both grew up eating vegetables grown in our home gardens. Neither of us had ever eaten any veggies from the grocery store. It has been important to both of us to start our own garden, for our family. We have tried container gardening, and a raised bed garden. The container garden didn't do well for us because we used Terra Cotta pots, and it was too hard to keep the soil watered without over watering, and then the soil got too hot, and on and on it goes. The raised bed was better, but we were very limited with space. With our raised bed, it was also very expensive because we needed to buy the soil and the wood to build it. We just removed the bed, and found termites, which was disgusting, and a little scary. After all of those problems, I tried to find something else, and found straw bale gardening.

For us, straw bale gardening seems like the perfect solution. It doesn't cost much to start up, and seems to be a great way to have home grown vegetables. My only dilemma was trying to find out if the bales that you see at garden centers are treated with anything. I called two of my local garden centers and asked them where they get the bales, and they both told me the same farm. I decided to call the farm to ask them about the bales, and they told me that they get the straw from a variety of farmers, so they would have to call me back with an answer. Unfortunately, I never got a call back from them, so I was back to square one. My next step was to find organic straw bales. This is an impossible thing to do. I did a Google search, and was coming up with absolutely nothing in my area. Apparently there isn't a market for organic straw bales? I was getting frustrated, and was venting my frustrations to my husband when I said, "I'm gonna call some of the vendors from the local farmer's market, someone has to know an organic wheat farmer." Then it dawned on me...Google organic wheat farmers. When I did, I finally found what I was looking for. I found a certified organic farm about 45 minutes away. I was so happy! I called them, and he said they had some bales in their barn from about two years ago. He said they don't really do the small bales anymore because the people they usually sell their straw to are fellow farmers that are looking for bedding for their animals. The size that they sell now are too big for a little straw bale garden. He gave me his son's number and told me to give him a call because he's the one in charge of all of the straw stuff. So I called him and scheduled a time to go to the farm to pick up the bales. When we got there, I told him about my search, and suggested they get online and advertise that they have organic straw bales. He said he'd look into it, and might start doing small bales for just such a thing. He said it's more work to make the small bales, but I hope they will continue to do them, I told him I would give him some information on where to advertise, so hopefully he will do it.

Anyway, that's where we are now. I will be doing a lot of updates on this, as well as explaining, as we go along. In the meantime, here is a picture of what it looks like now: