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.....
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:
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,

Love the wood floor! Looks beautiful!
ReplyDeleteThanks Chickie!
DeleteWow! Those floors came out great!
ReplyDeleteThanks Michelle! You can't believe how happy I was that they did so well, or maybe you can! :-)
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