Living Room: Time for Floors!

The new floors are finally going in! Yippee!! The end is actually in sight!

FYI - when you see all these DIY shows and they tell you how very simple it is to put in laminate flooring - don't believe it!

OK, that might be a little strong. You can believe them. Maybe it is simple if the floor you are installing over is pretty much pristine. Ours was not. We were pulling up 30-something year old carpet. Which meant 30-something year old padding. Padding which had been walked on, spilt on, walked on some more, cleaned numerous times, and who knows what else. In other words, it was a little compressed... matted down... compacted. As a matter of fact- in some spots in no longer resembled padding at all. But more of a hard rubber which was now part of the particle board underneath.

Thank heavens for all the hard work by The Man of the House and the female offspring who spent hours (and hours and hours) scraping that mess up and replacing areas of particle board which were not salvageable!

Finally, the floors were prepped. The new flooring was purchased. Installation is ready to begin!



Look!  Boxes of flooring!

First row is done!

Moving right along!

Living Room: Another Weekend of Work

This past weekend was spent finishing up with the priming and beginning the painting process.

Hallway: pre-primer

And post-primer

With the ceiling painted and the trim primed - the walls look so yellow and dingy.  Ewwww!

Priming the entry way took a LOT of work!

Painting the ceiling

First coat of pale grey paint on the living room wall



You can see the new color a little better in this picture contrasted against the old color



Living Room - Days 11 to 20: Prime Time!

The remodel came to a bit of a crawl for about a week - life just got busy and slowed us down. Things are still moving along though - even if it's a little slower than the first week.

We've been taping and compounding the new 1/2 wall at the top of the stairs.

Priming the new drywall around the fireplace

Taping and priming windows (taping is slooooow work!)

And priming various trim around doorways

Stay tuned!  Next up is ceiling paint - which should prove to be highly entertaining...

Living Room: Day 10 - More Drywall

Begin installing dry wall on new half wall at top of stairs:

Living Room: Day 9 - New Wall

The Man of the House framed the new 1/2 wall at the top of the stairs.

Living Room: Day 8

Hard to believe we've only been at this a week! And at the same time, hard to believe it's only been a week!


Saturday (Day 8) was dedicated to two items on the To-Do lists:

• remove the railing at the top of the stairs and get ready for wall construction

 

• remove old antenna and speaker outlets and patch the holes those would leave in the wall.

Yes, that's me - using power tools!



Living Room Makeover: Days 3-7

The week days were taken up with compounding and sanding the new dry wall behind the fireplace.

Living Room Renovation: Day 1 - Demolition

Since we are doing the work on our living room remodel ourselves to save cost (and because the man of the house is all handy like that!) , the first step was to rip out the shelves and panelling.  Time to destroy some stuff!!

The shelves are down!

Shelves gone. Panelling gone.

Oh my... what have we gotten ourselves into??

Living Room Renovation: The Befores

After living in our home for 13 years, we had finally reached the end of our rope when it comes to living with the 1970's decor. The built-in shelving units, fake panelling, free standing gas heater, and stained gold carpeting have GOT to go!! We're looking at a major re-do, which has to be done before the holidays! Yikes!!


This is what we're dealing with:

Built in shelving and fake panelling.  Oh... I mean "faux" panelling. 
So dark, so dreary, so... out of date!

Built in shelves wrap around the corner all the way to dining room entry

Overlooking entry way.  What's with the metal railing?

View of living room from top of stairs. Another great(?) view of out dated railing.

That's right.  Check out the gold carpet.  I know you're jealous!