Transformation Tuesday! Our Living and Dining Room Makeovers!

Oh Peeps!  Have I got EXCITING news to share with you today.  This has been coming for a long long time, but we finally did it!  After gracing the floors of this farm house for over 35 years, the carpet came up from our living room and dining room to reveal a beautiful treasure!  Hardwood floors!!!!!

As a bit of a backstory, some of you might not know that we live in the house that Tall Guy has always lived in, like came home from the hospital to here.  Generations of his family have lived here: both sets of grandparents and his parents.  Our house has gone through a lot of changes since it was first built in the early 1900's.  We've done our fair share too by adding the sun room/attached garage and our first floor bedroom.  This last change wasn't nearly as involved; it only took a week to do, but this might one of the major changes for us.

The family knows I have been wanting to change out the carpet for oh..., officially about 15 years (how long we have been married), but I have to say, it has had its purpose.  When the girls were very young, it hid a lot of messes and honestly about everything you could throw at it except maybe green Pladoh!

And then there was my Pumpkin who was kind of a darker version of this rug.....

Oh WOW!  Sniff  Sniff!  Where have my babies gone?  And since we are talking about the girls, you know I have always referred to them as Tink, the oldest, and Bear, the youngest...Well Miss Tink is now 13, and from now on, I will be referring to her as Miss K.... ok now back to our current story.

We finally got around to taking up the carpet and see if the hardwood floors had survived years of being covered.  We first got the idea when we added the bedroom and took up the carpet in what is now Tall Guy's office.  The hardwood floor was in great condition, and that really restarted the itch to pull up all the carpet downstairs.

As we plotted and planned this big move, we also decided to flip the living and dining rooms.  I'd only seen the house with the rooms as we had had them.  Hey, Go big or go home right?  Yeah, I know we are already home, but we were feeling adventurous so.....

First, we moved around a lot of the furniture.  Some of it went upstairs, some went in other rooms, and some went out the door.  Both of us like uncluttered living space, but after surviving the child years when everything from changing tables and pack and plays were downstairs to the mass of toys involved with keeping two little girls entertained, we had some purging to do.

Miss K was having a hard time saying good bye. Like the "holes" in our floor?  These are old fashion cold air ducts.  They now have the grates back on them.

I was holding my breath, as TG pulled back the carpet and started to tug at the padding below it.

I'm sure it doesn't look like much, but I was thrilled to see that there were no major stains or marks on these beautiful floors!  I was even more thrilled once we pulled all the staples out of the boards. I think there might have been over a thousand between both rooms! WE includes the girl, Nick Wallpe, and Jason Kintner.  Those last two guys were huge life or rather back savers !!!!!!  At this point, we also seamed all the cracks in the lovely plaster walls and repainted the walls!  Big thanks to Ben, Chris, and Laura of LB Designs for doing all that wall work in four days!

Now I bet you all are wondering how we went from the floor pictured above to the floor in the pictures below.

We didn't sand it down, we didn't refinish it, and we didn't put a drop of polyurethane on it.  This transformation was soo stinkin' simple I wish we had done it years ago!  We consulted our painter, Ben, who advised us to try mopping on this wonderful product:

And as you can see, sigh......, I need or one of the girls needs to run the dust mop over the floors! This lovely product, Rejuvenate, worked miracles on our floors!  I did have to mop it on the floors about 5 times because the wood was so dry that it soaked up the product as quickly as I could apply it, but the last application really made the wood shine.  It's not, however, slick, and that is what I was going for because I'm too dang old to run around here wearing gripper socks!

Holy Smokes!  I went back in my archives to link to a post about our new bedroom, and apparently I never wrote one!!!!  What. The. Heck. Happened?!?!?!?  I guess I now have my motivation to clean up that room and share it with you as well,  We've kind of been living in our room, all four of us, while the living room and dining room were in transition.

I will continue to update you as we decorate the walls with pictures and farmy things.   Hope you enjoyed the big reveal like we did!   Until next time,