Farewell flooring!

So this past weekend Jim and I decided it was time to start our flooring demolition. He had to work on Saturday and I had other family things to attend to on Saturday morning, so we didn't really start rolling until about 2:00 on Saturday afternoon. I must say though, I'm pretty happy with what we accomplished in about a day and a half.

We are planning on putting down new hardwood floors in our front (formal) living room, hallway, closets and dining area. All of those areas had carpet down. So Jim started with the dining area, ripping up the carpet. Now, we could tell there were some other layers under there but yikes! Three layers of linoleum! The only before shot I have of the dining area is the first day we saw the house...

...so you see it had carpet in that area.

Under the carpet was the first layer of linoleum which is like what we have in our kitchen now, and what you can sort of see in the picture above.

Under that was this beautiful stuff...

Nice, huh? And then Jim had to go through and pull up TONS of staples from this layer.

Then under that layer was this...

...with even more staples to pull up.

In the meantime, while Jim was having a grand old time pulling up staples, I was hard at work tearing up the carpet/padding/tack strips in the hallway.

At first I thought I was going to have to go through and pull up each staple by hand. I'm pretty sure I'd still be pulling staples had I not thought about the scraper Jim bought to remove the linoleum. We ran that over the staples and most of them came out. I had to go through and remove some by hand, but some was better than all.

Then it was time to move on to the living room.

Here's a before shot...

And after everything was removed...

In the midst of our flooring party, I suggested to Jim that we might as well throw a layer of Kilz on the wall before the new flooring goes in. See, I realize it makes more sense to paint before the hardwood goes in but I have no idea what color I want and I want to see the room with the flooring in it before I make a paint decision. Slapping up a layer of primer was doable though.

So we decided to Kilz the room...

...and there's all our flooring, acclimating to room temperature :o)

So next was to tackle the closets. Remove the doors, tracks, stupid molding, carpet, no big deal right? Wrong. I pulled up the carpet in the closet only to find hardwood under it. What? Was there hardwood in the whole house at one point? Seriously, I don't know what the deal is.

And unfortunately I couldn't quite muster the strength yesterday to remove that hardwood so I just worked on removing the doors, tracks and molding and tried to be on clean-up duty since Jim was busy painting.

Oh and here's Pants helping...

So here's where we stand today. I'm not sure if Jim plans on tackling the linoleum or the hardwood in the closets when he gets home from work, but the other closet needs to be emptied as well.

Oh and I don't know if you can tell in the picture below, but if you can see that white patch where the dining area meets the hallway, yeah, that's a mortar ramp so that the original sub floor could meet up nicely with the 5 layers of flooring that were added in the dining area. Sweet!

Office makeover

So finally some more house update photos.

I pretty much have the office how I want it to be so I figured it was finally time to snap some pics. I think it could use a new office chair (something fun), something to hang over the desk, and maybe once the garage sale find chair I found is refinished, that can go in there too. But for now it's pretty much done.

The office was originally covered in painted paneling. We knew we wanted to take it down and once we did, we discovered that a) the walls were completely destroyed from removing it and b) there was a giant gap in the drywall where the walls met the ceiling - which I was told is not quite up to fire code. Awesome.

Jim and I thought we'd be able to salvage the walls, but my dad took one look at it and said no way, new drywall for sure. He offered to help put it up and do the mudding so of course we said heck yes!

Here's the lovely wallpaper we found beneath the paneling...

And a during shot...

And the finished product...

The color is Behr's Deep Smoke Signal.

The desk was originally a cherry wood color so I painted it white along with the old dresser we had. I also decided to use curtains instead of closet doors. I knew I wanted a black and white damask curtain, but these have a fun chandelier print on them and I couldn't pass them up. Especially since I was hanging a chandelier in there.

I found this mirror at Home Goods (it was pink) and painted it white. I also attempted a little DIY with the bird art and put it in the Ikea frames.

These white curtains are also from Ikea.

I'm sure there's things I'll be adding here and there, but for now, I'm pretty happy with how it turned out.

Bags, bags and bags

So remember when I said I went to a Gigi Hill bag party and bought some stuff? Well here it is.

The first bag I got was actually a special offer. I could get it at a discounted rate if my total order was over a certain dollar amount. So with a combination of my order, my mom's order and a friend of mine's order who couldn't make it to the party, it put me over that mark. And of course I couldn't pass up a deal like that!

This is the Sophia with the English Chocolate fabric choice

18"L x 6"W x 12-3/4"H

Strap drop: 10"

The interior fabric is called Dynasty Celery and I love it! I think it's so fun! There's plenty of interior pockets to keep everything nice and organized too. I'm thinking this bag will come in quite handy for when I start school up again.

The next thing I got was the Lana business card holder.

4"L x 1/2"W x 3"H

I chose the Dove fabric for this one

It's pretty cool how the cards sort of lift up on a metal plate type thing when you open the holder.

I also got the Small Scarlet for little items.

8-1/2"L x 5-1/4"H

I chose the Pink Pearls fabric option for this one.

So that covers the Gigi Hill items. Onto a few more little bags.

A friend of mine used to sell Bag Daddy but it has since gone out of business. Of course right when I was planning on having a party so I could get a few items. Well she had these little bags that I always loved so I was bummed I couldn't get them anymore. Of course I started checking eBay because I figured everyone would probably be trying to sell their stuff off. Well I finally found them and was pretty happy about that.

The larger one is is 6-3/4" x 8-3/4" and the smaller one is 6-1/2" x 7-1/2".

Aren't they fun?

Someone (::ahem, Jill::) convinced me to have my own Gigi Hill party so I'll be doing that in October. I'm hoping that maybe some new items and new fabrics will have come out by then. For now though, I should probably steer clear of buying anymore bags.

New art for the family room

I'm so excited to finally have art on the walls in our family room. I'm even more excited because I took all of the pictures.

There are two 16x24 and four 16x16 pictures. They are mounted on 3/16" foam board so no need for frames :o)