Floor-vember

At the beginning of this year, we knew we wanted to replace our downstairs flooring. Our carpet was very worn out and stained in various spots and it BUGGED me. I never felt like our downstairs felt very clean because even when I scrubbed and scrubbed, you could still see carpet stains. It was stains from silly stuff here and there through 6+ year of wear. It also was a very cheap carpet....we had planned to tear it out right when we built the house instead of having the builder charge us up the wazoo for their carpet prices. After thinking about it, we decided just to live with the carpet instead of trying to renovate a brand new house and I think that was a good decision. We were going to do new counters too but decided just to enjoy what we have....

Anyways, fast forward almost 7 years! We knew we wanted to do wood floors because we didn't want carpet that was just going to get stained up again, and because of the floor plan of our house having one flooring surface was really in our best interest (with the exception of the entry way and bathroom). If we did carpet we'd have to do something different in the kitchen and I didn't really want carpet in our dining area again. Not fun picking food out of carpet below the high chair.

We bought maple floors that are what I wanted in our price range. I do like the look of dark hand scraped floors but I feel like those are becoming almost generic flooring, you see them everywhere. They are beautiful but we decided we wanted a different look and I didn't want to fork out the extra money for the handscraped. I am really pleased with what we chose and how it looks.

Brett planned to start this project while we were in Sunriver back in early November. He had a list of things we wanted to accomplish: paint the entire downstairs, tile the entry way and powder bath, install hardwood floors, replace baseboards and touch up all the white woodwork downstairs. We figured this would be a two weekend project.

Hahahahahahahahaaahahahaha.

We finished the floors last night. Last. Night.

Now, I could be the bitter kind of wife that gets super ticked at her husband for insisting we do this ourselves and thus ruining drastically altering our November but I'm just too nice of a wife to be that way. We did save a lot of money by doing the floors ourselves, however......it was really really hard. And guess what? I installed just as much as Brett did! I used the nail gone and was very self sufficient at laying the boards and nailing and SAWING (which I totally dig). Aside from the technical planning of transitions between rooms and other details I won't bore you with, I could totally lay floors by myself. Maybe I should hire myself out? ;) It was VERY HARD work. Like my body hurt more from doing 10 hours of flooring then it did from doing the first day of the 30 Shred, and that's saying a lot. The flooring we picked has narrow boards so that make the project take a lot longer. It was also VERY loud so it wasn't something we could do when the kids were around because they'd be upstairs, unsupervised and that's okay for Emersyn but not so much for my dare devil son. :) For the first week I enjoyed the hard work. Brett and I totally bond through teamwork and accomplishing together. We sometimes feel more connected after a night of cleaning and organizing then we do at the end of dinner and a movie on a date, no joke! We enjoy working together and I think you just naturally love someone for working hard for you. He didn't intend for this to be as much my project as it was. He thought he'd get help from his brother for a couple days and that would be it....but alas, that was not how it turned out. :)

Last night Brett nailed in the very last board and we almost cried from joy. I think he may have cried when I wasn't looking, ha! He was super worn out and weary from this project, even more so then I was because he was the brains behind it. And did I mention that he learned how to do the floors entirely by researching online? I was not aware of this fun fact before the project started...I assumed a friend at his work had showed him how or something. It's probably best I didn't know this before the project started...I might have had some doubts.

The floors are done but there is still work to be done....this weekend we'll paint and get started on the baseboards. My parents come into town for two weeks a week from this Saturday and then it's like full speed ahead until the end of the year. We ARE going to get this done before they get here. Thankfully the stuff that needs to be done now isn't crazy loud stuff that we can't do with our kids here.

Here's a picture of the wood. I'll take more pictures once the entire transformation is done. 

So that's how our Floor-vember went. :) Life is never dull around the Jensen home!