New Floors!

For anyone who saw the floors in my house, hopefully you don't necessarily remember how gross the carpet was... but it was. No matter how many times I vacuumed or shampooed, the stains (mostly from the previous occupants but some for the various dogs who have lived in the house) would come back. Some of the rooms had a generally funky smell.

And thanks to Matt's handiness and my brute strength, and little loan from my folks, we were able to replace all our carpet with laminate wood floors!



To make the floor continuous from the living room (carpeted) to the kitchen (laminate on particle board), we ended up having to rip out particle board that was stapled to the subfloor in the dining room and kitchen. Otherwise there would have been about a 1/4-1/2 inch step up into the kitchen/dining room.

It was a horrible job because the particle board just wants to chip into fist-size or smaller pieces and the staples were so long that if I jammed a crowbar under it and lifted as much as possible with the crowbar, it wasn't enough to get the staples out so I had to loosen, then pry off as much as possible before it chipped a small chunk. Then we didn't have the right tool to cut the particle board against the cabinets (since the cabinets were laid on top of the particle board) so I tediously chipped away at it. We ended up putting some molding to hide it (not pictured here).

Our master looks great now! It's painted a deep red wine color on half the walls with the other half and the ceiling as a reddish tan...



AND because we can't stay on one project at a time, we also redid our fireplace...

Before -- I hated the glued-on tiles. It might've looked good if they'd gone all the way up the wall with it. But they were cheap and it looked cheap. I wanted a mantle.

After