New Floors: Phase I

Phase I:

• Step 1: Tear up tile in foyer/back door way and carpet in family room/hallway - COMPLETE
• Step 2: Replace some of the subfloor particle board - this step is a new one thanks to finding some wet/swollen? particle board after pulling up the carpet. Projects are never as easy as you think they're going to be are they? Mark plans to finish this step tomorrow and start on step 3
• Step 3: Lay the laminate flooring in the family room, hallway and foyer

I forgot to put up some before pictures, so here are a couple of shots of what our family room looked like 2 days ago...

Piper likes to photobomb my pictures... she apparently needed to go outside... :)

 AND here's what it looks like now:

Again, Piper with the photobomb! See all of the "stains" in the sub floor? Which looks gross, but apparently its from having your carpet shampooed - which we've done twice - the water soaks through the carpet to the particle board and makes it all puffy and stained. Anyways - we have to replace parts of it like I mentioned earlier...

Our entrance way is all torn up too - the tile was difficult and time consuming to tear up. Or so Mark tells me, he didn't want me to help with any of that :)

Mark and Piper needed a little break before tearing up the last section of carpeting... By the way... Like our couch? We were blessed by it when we got married - a hand me down from Mark's parents. The plaid Christmas colors aren't exactly matching my home's color scheme though so we put a cover over it as seen in the "before" pictures : ) 

Piper is not a fan of the temporary flooring situation, she preferred hanging out on the couch, especially when her daddy was hanging out there with her...

I'm working all day tomorrow, until 7pm, so we are hopeful that replacing the subfloor won't take too long and that there might be a small start to our new floors down by the time I get home. Mark is going to be working on his own tomorrow so I will be praying for my man all day that he's able to get done what he wants to without getting frustrated! 

Looking forward to posting updated pictures of the project as the week goes on!

New Floors!

A super big project is actually commencing at the house on Stockleybridge this week. We are putting in the new laminate wood flooring that I talked about in my last post. Getting new floors was always on our "eventually" list when we bought the house 2 1/2 years ago. Its not that we hated what we had (carpet in the living area, hallway and dining room, laminate in the kitchen and tile in the foyer and back door way) its just that I never LOVED the color of tile, the style of laminate in the kitchen or having carpet in the dining room. Not to mention after we got a puppy, the carpet started to gross me out in a way it never really had before. You know, puppies have accidents, and even with all of the scrubbing and carpet cleaning I never liked the thought of the "mess" having soaked in to the padding during those potty training days. Also - our dog sheds like she's putting on a new outfit every day.  Even with daily vacuuming I never seem to get all of her hair up. So keeping those things in mind - knowing that we have a baby on the way that will be crawling all over said floors by next year - we decided to use our tax return money to put in new floors this year! I also won't be working much, if it all, after the baby is born, so we are using the extra money from my paychecks to get some things done before we lose that second income. We know major projects might come to a stall following baby as we adjust our budget to one income.

Anyways, enough rambling on about why we're getting new floors. I could go in to more details, but you get the gist...

Here's the wood flooring we picked out:

We've got about 52 boxes of these planks in our dining room right now. We purchased them last weekend because apparently when you put in laminate flooring you're supposed to let it sit in your house to acclimate to your homes temperature - to avoid expansion/shrinking problems after laying it down. I'm learning quite a bit during this process! My husband is a very thorough researcher before he begins a project and I welcome the sharing of all of the new information he learns.

Mark is hard at work tonight tearing up the tile in our foyer. He has taken the week off to put the floors in. Another detailed explanation: Mark has accrued so much paid time off at his job thanks to being a hard worker and rarely missing a day - that if he doesn't start taking time off he'll lose A LOT of those hours at the end of the year. Even with taking 2 weeks off after the baby is born, he still needed to take more time off to avoid losing hours. Thus - the week off to lay down floors. Isn't that such a blessing? (I only have just over a weeks worth of PTO at my job!) Now we'll be able to get the project done with less stress and not trying to cram it in into a weekend or after Mark gets off work. 

Sorry for the blurry picture and my husbands boxers... the area was a bit dusty but I didn't mind the view while I snapped a few pictures ; ) I am so thankful for my handyman husband and all the projects he's done at our house on his own.