Back with a Long Post

After a 2 month hiatus {whoops} here I am! Do I find it easier to fit blogging into my schedule during the colder months when there is less to do outside? Maybe. Or maybe the fact that we have so many projects going on simultaneously is what has me tied up. That being said, lately we've been busy with some finishing touches around this place...

• As covered in another post, we finished the flooring installation & we started nailing in the quarter round - we decided to spend a little extra on the round that matches our Pergo and so far we are very pleased with that choice. Our first "completed" room is the office. It's so great to see it all put back together. Pictures to be posted very soon!

• In the kitchen, we decided to put up real wood for the toe kick under the cabinets {rather than rubber kick that was previously there}. It's hard to post a picture of this, but just trust me, it looks better this way than it did! Check it out:

• So far summer has been waaaaay RAINY, but we were able to stain the deck in-between downpours. We used Flood brand in cedar. It's cheap, durable, and I love it. Below you can see the deck before stain in the left photo, after stain in the right photo:

• We planted flowers, but haven't mulched. Not really sure when that will get done, but I'm not extra worried about it. Who knows, maybe we'll get a really spectacular indian summer this year and it will be done by then {fingers crossed!} So here we see one of the urns from the front stoop, my little potted English ivy, the veggie garden - we added cattle fencing to the corner for taller plants to climb, and one of the larger planters with pine/coleus/ivy/& a flower I can't recall that are on the back patio:

PS: Today the dining room board & batten is being installed, tomorrow I can paint it white & then that room will be finished! So. Excited. Can't wait to share with you guys!

It's Done!

The Pergo is totally installed! Hallelujah! With help from Andrew's dad, we were able to rip out the rest of the carpet, prime & paint the trim, and lay the final floor boards. It was a long project, and there are still finishing touches to accomplish. But here are some pictures of our handiwork. Once things are back in their proper places and all decorated again I want to post some dramatic "Before & After" side-by-side comparisons. But for now enjoy these!

Things were off to a great start once the guys were able to remove the ceramic tile from the foyer. It took them about 3 hours and made A TON of dust.

After that, we were able to lay more boards in the dining room and remove the carpet {and staples!} in the office. 

The displaced furniture situation was REAL. Our entire home library made it's way to the steps, while all other tables, chairs, lamps, jars, flowers, fishing poles, world globes & extra tools {I see you in that photo, bottom left corner junk table!} got a temporary new home in the living room.

Next, Andrew continued with the flooring while I primed the trim. Then he went outside to mow the lawn while I continued on with the painting inside. We had the windows open and music blaring - it was a good Saturday!

When Sunday rolled around, we went to church, came home & immediately got to work finishing things. As previously stated, the rooms aren't quite put back together 100%. But the floor sure does look amazing! 

L-to-R pictured is the Dining Room, Foyer, Office. 

HUGE sigh of relief! Once we install quarter round, the project will be complete. Though it was trying at times and often stressful, we're pretty proud of the job. Plus, we saved ourselves a boatload of money by DIYing. Stay tuned for our final reveal of how everything looks!

Keep creating, DIYers!

Renovation Update

Hi everyone! We've been slowly but surely making progress on our new floor installation. So far we've finished the kitchen, laundry, pantry and half bath…and made it into the dining room! There is so much furniture displaced into our office we can barely stand going in there for anything. We just keep reminding ourselves that all the mess & shuffling are temporary and we'll be happy with the results.

One of the challenges we ran into in the dining room was the subfloor. For some weird reason, we discovered it is about 1/4 inch shorter than the kitchen. To fix this we were able to buy a roll of underlayment to help match the difference, but for a while we were freaking out! So now we have Pergo in the dining room. We moved my empty china hutch on top of it so we have room to lay more floor. Because of the way the floor boards run, we're now at a standstill until we remove the tile in the foyer. Once that is gone we can continue with the floor, running it across the foyer and on into the office. Andrew is pretty sure he's going to rent a machine to help chop the tile and cement board up this weekend.

I've also been painting the trim here and there. My goal is to have the woodwork throughout the whole house end up white {eventually}. I would say I roughly have 50% of the downstairs painted, and 10% done upstairs. Slow and steady wins the race.

Here are a few photos of our continued progress:

 

Thanks for checking on us!

Fear, Possibility, and Great Expectations

On Monday I was painting and listening to the Invisibilia podcast. The topic was fear. The show's hosts interviewed a woman who has a rare brain condition where her amygdala has been compromised by calcium deposits, resulting in the inability to feel fear. The podcast asked the question, 'What would you do if you had no fear?' Limitless possibilities! The program went on to talk about snakes and social anxiety and trying to abolish fear by facing it head-on. Which brings me to my next point.

We are afraid to lay our flooring. Or maybe fear isn't the best term. We don't scream when we think of it. But we don't want to do it wrong, so we avoid it. The planks are sitting in the corner of our dining room in a pile. An organized mountain of limitless possibility. Sometimes I secretly hope to walk downstairs one morning and find it all magically self-installed.

Due to the unlikelihood of that materializing… 
We began ripping the linoleum up a day or so ago. We saved our giant cardboard microwave box for all of the trash.

There are two layers of linoleum. It is sticky, gross & difficult to rip up. At one point, I was getting cocky because I got a big sheet to come off, then the next section I tried to pry up {which must have had extra glue underneath} took much more effort. It was coming up in tiny dollar bill sized pieces.  Andrew double checked online to make sure there wasn't some fancy tool we'd overlooked that would help us out. But his search lead to one common thread/consensus: Removing linoleum is a by-hand job that is tedious & terrible.

My dad would say this activity was "character building."

We didn't want to spend our {entire} Saturday doing that, and our arms & hands were sore. If you looked at our kitchen right now, you would probably think we worked on it for about 15 minutes and then got busy doing something else. In reality we worked on it for hours. We ripped up around 1/3 of the kitchen area, then called it a day. Taking a break from that fun, today I've been going around priming & painting the baseboards white. Baby steps.

Some parts of this project yield bigger results than others, but we're in it for the long haul. And now that the floor looks so crappy we have no choice but to continue with things and install the Pergo. At least that is the trick we are attempting to play on ourselves…

Expectations can predict a great deal about the success or failure of a DIY project* 

*for more on that, check out this story - another episode of that podcast I mentioned earlier. Fascinating!

Pergo to the Max

Well, we did it. We officially bought 46 boxes of Montgomery Apple Pergo Max.

For now, the flooring is hanging out in the corner of the dining room. From time to time I walk past the pile to admire and imagine. It's going to look really nice…eventually. We have serious labor to accomplish between now & then. 

We'll need to juggle furniture around to empty one room at a time in order to rip out  the old flooring & baseboards. So that's removal of carpet in the office and dining rooms, linoleum in the kitchen/pantry/half bath/laundry room. The tile in the foyer may or may not stay, we haven't decided.

We hope to begin work on this huge undertaking soon. Technically, we could pay professionals to do the installation. However, the installation charge doesn't include ripping out the old stuff. If we have to rip it all out anyways, we might as well lay the laminate {At least, that is our current stream of thinking!} Time will tell.

Pondering Pergo...

For the past year, we have been tossing around the idea of laying new flooring on the first story of our house. We love watching shows on HGTV and the DIY Network where old homes are restored - wooden floors, bead board, crown molding, oh my! Seeing those transformations has really inspired us. Our house is 20 years old and as such there are certain things in it that don't really appeal to us, like carpet in our dining room. Blah! It will never make sense to me!

Adding older touches to a newer home really increases the cozy, homey factor. We're definite fans of the warmth & charm of wooden flooring. Although we don't have any pets or children, we are leaning toward laminate for it's durability and low maintenance. We want to put it in every room on the main level but leave the family room carpeted. So the rooms that will get the laminate include: laundry room, kitchen, half bath, dining room, foyer and office.

We've been eying Pergo Max Montgomery Apple for a while. We look at it every time we're at Lowe's! The last time we were there, Andrew had the brilliant idea to buy a box so we could take it home and lay a few boards in each room to see if we liked the look. Montgomery Apple is light tan with swirls of dark brown, and more like authentic hardwood than other available options. The underlayment is attached, also. Andrew has previous experience with laying laminate flooring and wanted to try the attached version this time around. It seems like a nice feature.

Here's a swatch:

After testing it out in every room, the verdict is...we like it! It's not too dark, not too light, and compliments our current trim and darker furniture. Eventually I'm going to be painting the kitchen cabinets/trim white and it will look really nice against that, too. Buying a test box was a really good move because it allowed us to truly envision how the flooring would look in our house. Sometimes it's hard to see the big picture when you're just standing in the aisle at the hardware store.

Now comes the harder part - purchasing all of the boxes followed by room-by-room installation. I told Andrew that it will probably test the marriage... HA! We decided it will be our big winter project.

What do you think? We would love to know if any of you have experience with laminate. Give me your feedback! We want the good, the bad, and the ugly so we know what to do and what to avoid.  

Wish us luck!