Radiator Sludge Removal & Floor Repair

I mentioned a couple of posts ago about those radiator pipes  in the guest room.

About a foot away from the bed, perfectly hidden behind the curtains, prime toe smashing territory, folks.

If you've been reading for a long time, you might remember us mentioning the heating ordeal with this house and why we got rid of the radiators in the first place. If not, here's the cliff's notes:
foreclosed property
vacant a couple of years
radiators froze and burst in that time
poor, young dummies buy house, discover lack of heat
love can keep us warm, etc., etc.
no it can't
get central heat installed
start removing some radiators where space is a commodity (i.e. guest bedroom, living room)

So, yeah! Conan and his dad removed the boiler and the rusting pipes that were accessible from the basement.

Then my mom and I took a few of the radiators (like this one in the living room) apart and removed them.

It wasn't all that difficult to remove but unfortunately, on the second floor where we can't get to them from underneath, there were still these lovely pipes sticking up out of the floor...

and a heavily damaged floor underneath where the radiator had sat.

 Well, while I was at work a couple of weekends ago, my handy dad cut them off at the floor and CAREFULLY lowered what was left of the pipe down into the floor! Toe smashers be gone! 

I hit the area with a belt sander (the same one we used to re-finish the kitchen floor) and that pretty much took care of the ugly black spot that was there. 

I put a single coat of poly-shades on there and um...it wasn't a perfect match color-wise so I hit it with the belt sander one more time and tried just plain polyurethane on the spot at Conan's suggestion.

Is it perfect? No. Is it an improvement? Heck yes. I'm glad to know that it's as easy and simple as it was so that I might be inclined to do this in the living room someday and make a better match. It would also be easier to plug the holes since we can do it from the basement underneath.

I had planned on buying a runner to put there anyway to cover up the holes until we can devise some sort of plug/peg solution and after shopping around I found one at Target that spoke to me. Well, Cartwheel spoke to me and it sounded like, "Katherine, this particular rug is 25% off so maybe you like it a lot, yeah?"

It really ties the room together, man.

So, that worked out pretty well I think. Well enough that I feel comfortable trying it down in the living room.

As you can see from this photo, I picked out a real, grown-up bedspread. It's kind of a blue-ish gray in person and it looks really nice with the ship painting above the bed.

Just a few more little things here and there and I'm calling it done. In the meantime, we gave the front porch a good cleaning the other day and my parents may have tracked us down some affordable (i.e. borrowable/free) scaffolding so the exterior of the house might get a little attention before the fall. Our neighbor saw us outside cleaning and said he was going to start painting his house this weekend. My mom asked him how long he thought it would take and he said, "Few days."
A FEW DAYS.
He asked us how long we thought ours would take and we laughed like two crazy people and said,
"A year? Maybe more?"

Here's to realistic expectations!

Have a great week, everybody!