Catching up

I still haven't posted about the work we did on the house over Christmas vacation! (In fact, I still haven't posted pictures of the house along with what my plans are) We'll start with flooring since that was the first of our two major projects over break.

We had already replaced the carpet in the front room with new carpet. All of the upstairs is wood and tile, we were planning to do laminate (for now) downstairs, and there is tile. Jim wanted to do laminate in the front room also, but I really wanted one room to have carpet for wrestling, laying on the floor watching movies, forts, etc. Previously, the back of the first floor had terrible berber in the family room and dining room (I cannot STAND carpet in a dining room!!!). It also had awful vinyl in the kitchen. So, when we got home from school Friday afternoon we immediately began tearing out the carpet in the dining room and worked our way through the kitchen and family room. The kitchen was the worst because we (Jim) also had to remove the particle board under the vinyl. What a job! So... here are the durings and afters! I can't believe the difference it made in the way I feel about this old house!

The terrible carpet that was in the dining room and family room. (And the awful light that I talked Jim into changing for me)

Stella loves to help with any and all projects! Demo day was a good one for her.

Kitchen demo day was by far the most labor intensive. We had to rip out all of the underlayment so that the floors would be even, and there was some water damage in one spot in the kitchen. SO worth it! You can see how ugly the vinyl is here too.

Finishing up the kitchen demo - Stella did NOT like the sound of the hammer on the pry bar.

It was a bit tougher for her to help with laying the floor though she wanted to terribly. She loved it so much she wanted to run around the big empty dining room in circles. It was tough to get her to stay off of it and not to pop any of the pieces out while we were working.

I can't believe that we still haven't gotten a better "after" picture. At least here you can get an idea of how much better it flows from the kitchen to the dining room. I love the look of the dark "wood" with the white cabinets.

Stella hanging out and enjoying the new floors!

It's pretty surprising how well Jim and I work together. Not everyone can do things like this together - we're lucky. Our strengths also compliment one another very well. One thing that we learned from doing this project: when we redo the kitchen for "real" we won't be doing laminate floors. They look great when they're clean, but they aren't nearly as tough as our slate tile was in the old house and it looks dirty SO quickly. I'm 98% sure that when we do the major renovation we'll go with slate again (and probably do it ourselves again)!

I still need to put together a post on the other kitchen improvements. I'll try to get some better after pictures of the floors too!