I've briefly mentioned our patio door before, but here's a more in depth look:



The door glass is broken, so that's why there's plywood over it. The door is also badly scratched and really doesn't open properly. We were thinking about installing new glass in the door or just replacing it with another wooden door so we headed to our nearest home improvement store and inquired about new wooden doors.


Wood doors aren't cheap and since our door was a custom size, it made matters slightly worse. The cost to replace our door with a wood duplicate would have been something like $5,400! We decided to just buy an in stock vinyl door and fit it into our door opening. The cost of a vinyl door was about $450. Sure, our house is going to look super weird having a white vinyl door, but any time I can save $5000 is a good day! Also, it will be so nice to have a functional door again!  I hate fighting with the existing door for it to open.

Raising The Floor
We knew we wanted to raise the floor in the living room back up to be level with the rest of the house. We could tell the floor was lowered sometime after the house was built and thought that bringing it back up wouldn't be that difficult. We were just going to cut the supports in the basement and actually raise the floor back to where it used to be. Then we realized the floor was glued down and wouldn't come back up in one piece. We would have spent more time ripping the floor apart where the easier solution was to just buy some boards and build on top of the existing floor.


Electrical
The problem with bringing the floor back up was that all of the electrical outlets for the entire living room were placed in the sides of that floor. Raising it back up means getting rid of those outlets.


Painting The Sub Floor
In trying to cut down the smell of the house, we painted the sub floor. Also, remember those hard woods that I was hoping for? Plywoods were more like it! At least the plywood wasn't in awful condition, although there are some weak spots. It doesn't really matter in the living room, though, because a new floor is going on top of this.  I'll talk more about this in another house update.


Fireplace & Mantel
While the beam on the fireplace is extremely solid, it's also extremely damaged. There's a huge hole right in the middle of the beam. We thought about flipping the beam to expose a better side of it, but there wasn't a better side! It looks like it might have been flipped before. We're planning on adding some boards around the old beam to make it more visually appealing. We're also going to add a mantel around the entire fireplace.

Flooring
I'm still not totally sure on what flooring we're going to use on this room. We found a flooring style we really loved but it's really expensive. It's supposed to be 100% waterproof and scratch proof, which is really appealing to us because we have pets, but we're still hung up on the price.