Home Improvement: Living Room

Here is our finished living room.

Almost everything in this room has been replaced since we moved in nearly four years ago. The front door was really old and rotten, and parts were held together with packing tape! We replaced it a couple of years ago, a generous gift from Andrew's parents. I painted the room a natural green color called "Witch Hazel." We pulled out all of the old, icky carpeting from this room, and Andrew and my parents replaced it with laminate wood flooring. The floor was a housewarming gift from my parents, so we really lucked out in some of these expenses. My mom helped me install new baseboards to replace the old, fake-wood ones. We hung new curtains, and I bought a new floor lamp from IKEA.

Here's a before and after photo that shows the old room color, old door, and old carpet.

New Carpet!

We finally, finally got new carpet yesterday! When we moved into our house, there was a powder blue carpet that wound from the entry way, through the living room, up the stairs, and into both bedrooms. It was a outdated, but that wasn't the big problem. It had a faint smell of dog pee (better than cat pee!). It also had numerous stains and large bleach stains in places.

We removed it entirely from the downstairs when we put in our laminate wood floors. Of course, it had to be replaced everywhere else, but we kept putting it off. What's the point in getting new carpet when we were about to have a baby? Babies spit up and poop everywhere! So we waited. And waited.

I cleaned the carpet a number of times with a carpet cleaner. It helped with the smell, but, on rainy days, you could get a whiff in the air. It was so unsightly that we almost never had anyone go upstairs.

Now that we're planning on putting our home on the market, we couldn't put it off any more. Carpet was more expensive than we'd thought, but it had to be done. We went with the second estimate (Carpet Exchange). They did a really good job with the install, and I love the new carpet. I only wish we'd done it a little sooner so we could have lived in the house long enough to get some use out of it!

Here's a photo of our room looking very spiffy with the new carpeting. There's something else new in our bedroom, too. My friends Aminta and Olivia went with me to Whimsy Paint & Sip yesterday with some vouchers from Living Social. We had a blast, and I got a new piece of artwork for the house!

My painting:

Kitchen Updates

Here are our before and after photos of the kitchen. Some of the improvements were made a while ago, but the lighting in the kitchen is brand new.

New Floors!

The flooring is offically done in the dining room, kitchen and living room! Once we get our bathroom pipes moved on Tuesday, we'll finish the flooring in there, too. It looks so much nicer in here, and it feels great to be rid of all the stinky (literally) blue carpet.

Tearing out the Flooring

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Ah, fun with home ownership. My parents want to get Andrew and I new flooring as our housewarming gift. Unfortuantely, as it works, before the new stuff comes in, the old stuff must come out.

The kitchen and bathroom floors were raised about two inches higher than the rest of the downstairs flooring. We knew, of course, that this meant previous owners had failed to remove the layers of old flooring before adding on their new choices. So it came down to Andrew and me to remove the layers (and layers) of Pergo, linoleum and sub-flooring.

OK, so Andrew did most of the work. I scrubbed down the kitchen appliances as they were moved, though, and that was pretty much the nastiest task ever.

At this point, half the kitchen is down to its subfloor, and the other half has one more layer of linoleum left. Thankfully, it doesn't appear to be glued down. Point one for us. On the other hand, it's held down by approximately 2.3 million staples. It appears someone had a little too much fun with their staple gun...