When we bought the house, we figured we wouldn't have to spend TOO much fixing it up, since there had been an owner living in it for the past 27 years, but.. well, it was more than we expected.

The previous owner never had internet, so there was no cabling for that. Wonderful. What I decided to do, was since the floor plan was really non-conducive to running ethernet cables around (and because I dislike wireless on desktops), I decided to have the contractor run wires through the walls. This ended up with a 6 port patch panel in my room (master bedroom), and 6 ports in miscellaneous places around the house (one in each of the 4 bedrooms [master for me, one for brother, one for game room, one that we hope to rent], one in the family room [hope to make this a tv room someday], and one in the spa room, notably spa-less, just for the hey of it). Apparently if you do this, you're supposed to run 2 cables, just in case one shorts, but I didn't know that... sigh. I also had him add a few electrical outlets as well, since the house was lacking them in a few places.

Next, the back 2 rooms. Before I go into this, I should specify what they are. The house was originally listed at 1900 square feet. They got a permit, and turned the patio into a full room, which they put the spa in. This room is ~18x15, for approx 270 sq ft (guessing), and has solid walls, since it's an official room. Then, they added another little room right outside the kitchen (we call it the lanai or the sun room), with much weaker paneling, and a LOT of plexiglass windows. This room was NOT permitted, but it's about 18x11, for ~200 sq ft. So officially, the house is ~2200 sq ft, but unofficially, it's 2400. Unfortunately, since these rooms were addons, they weren't really furnished all that well...

So, first, the sun room. The previous owner (her name is Ruth, and Ruth is shorter to type than previous owner... so, yeah) wasn't big on furnishing, so she basically just bought tons of pieces of carpet and put them down, then slapped a couch in there. When we looked, there were 3-4 pieces of carpet covering the ground, not the prettiest sight. Also, the wall that used to go into the kitchen was still stucco. Also, the wood paneling was all dark colored, plus the ceiling is a bit lower, so the room just felt small and cramped, despite being full of windows... Ugh. Next, the spa room. Just like the sun room, mixed pieces of carpet, and 2 stucco walls. Sigh.

Our first step was to ask the contractor what he could do. Step 1, paint both rooms white, since they had dark wood paneling inside. Step 2, the stucco. His first thought was to toss up drywall over it, but we scrapped that. He then suggested using something called 10-minute, which is a sort of plaster compound. Put a few layers on, then sand it down so it was flat. Sounds good, so we had them do that.

In the process of doing the spa room, they had to empty the room out. Since Ruth used that room as storage, it was... full of junk. Worse, she left it all to us because she didn't know what to do with it. It all went out in the backyard, and then when they finished, we said "Bring a dumpster and we'll toss most/all of it". So they did, and we filled up a huge dumpster.. probably 10ftx6ft? And easily 6ft high...

And of course, he did fixing of cracks and holes and stuff. So, on to what turned out to be the MAIN event, the floors of the 2 back rooms. This entry turned out to be super long, so the flooring story comes in a bit. Sorry if this one wasn't interesting, I had hoped to put the flooring part in here.