Tuesday, February 24, 2009

Got to Love a Cement Slab

When we were considering moving I told Nathan that I wanted our new house to only be one story. So much orneriness (yes, that's a word) went on in our old house because I was upstairs doing something and JM was loose downstairs or vice versa. Our stairs were so creaky that they could hear me coming and it wasn't very often that we caught them in the act of orneriness. Not to mention all the squeaky floor spots that Nathan and I pretty much had mapped out mentally. How hard is it to close a sleeping baby's door when the whole threshold of the door is the sqeakiest spot in the house.
Here in our sweet little duplex everything is one floor. I. Love. It. I can be in the kitchen and see them in their room, the bathroom, (we're working on learning to shut the door when you are going potty), the living room and even outside. Our house is built on a cement slab. There is no crawl space at all. All the water pipes run through the floor and come up just were they are needed. One sad side effect of this is that I'm limited to wear I can put the t.v. because I can have Nathan drill a new hole in the floor for me to move but the great side effects overrule this one.
THEY CAN'T HEAR ME COMING!!!!!! ha ha ha (read diabolical laugh). There are no creaks or squeaks anywhere on the floor. I love it. They are coming to understand that when they are doing something they shouldn't mom is going to stick her head around the door and bam! They are busted.
Case in point. They other day I had been busy folding laundry and heard some interesting noises coming from the boys room. I came in and JM and Peanut were using the bed clothes as parachutes and jumping off the top bunk. Very reminescent of this blog post involving Indiana Jones. Needless to say, I put a stop to that but they've tried it several more times. I'm praying we don't get any broken bones from this rock hard floor.
All in all, I'm really loving our new little house. Now we're off to get material for curtains for the kitchen and the living room.

3 comments:

Hope said...

I'm glad you love your new cement slab. I am jealous that there are no creaky spots on your floor. We have a really bad creaky spot right near Benji's bed! It's so obnoxious!

Anonymous said...

I'm a Californian, so almost all of the houses I've lived in were cement slab. Which is sometimes fine, but usually means ants come right up out of the carpet through the inevitable mini-cracks in the slab caused by earthquakes and normal settling. Many slab homes do have the pipes set in the slab, but others have them running overhead in the "upper crawl space," which is very messy if a pipe breaks, which happened to some friends of ours.

What I don't like, personally, about a slab is that the outdoor areas are all on the same level as the house unless you live on a hill. I love the look of a deck (especially a multi-level deck), but the only way we could have a deck is to build it higher than the existing patio, which would look pretty goofy in our yard.

And ya know what else? Our Pergo floors -- which "float" over the slab, rather than being glued or nailed to subfloor -- squeak :o)

Thanks again for stopping by my blog!

Victoria

Stephanie Kay said...

I know my guys would jump off of a bunkbed! That's one reason I'm not keen on the idea.

My guys can hear me coming - we have a basement. But they usually fail to remember food is on their face and fingers. For now the oldest doesn't have a poker face. Lies are written all over it. The next one is a little more difficult.