CrazedPhotoMom

Our First Home Improvement Project of the Summer

We have a couple of home improvement projects in the works for this summer and finished our first one last week! We tore up the off-white (speckled) carpet we had installed when they built the house and installed hardwood. I don't know what I was thinking when I picked out a light colored carpet when we had 3 little kids - apparently, I wasn't. It was HORRIBLY stained despite cleaning it often. And when we pulled it up, you could see that the fibers of the carpet were already beginning to break down and probably wouldn't have lasted more than another year, maybe two. Anyway, I took quite a few pics so take a peek...

A before picture of the carpet.

You can see the color difference - on the right near the wall is what it originally looked like (where the couch was sitting). And on the left, the area that had heavy traffic.
When we had the tile done in the kitchen/dining room a couple of years ago, they also reworked the tile in the front entryway (since the builders of the house weren't competent). For the longest time, Nate had a rocking chair on that area of tile and it ended up cracking all the way acrossed it. So, we tore up that tile so we could put the hardwood over there as well. Ripping up that area was the most time consuming. The ceramic tiles themselves came up easy. But the cement backer board underneath took forever - a total of about 4-5 hours!!
Here are the girls checking out the floor part way through the installation!
And here's Joey hard at work. It was pretty warm the couple of days we did the work and he was sweating bullets. But he did a great job, as always!! His hands paid the price - he had blisters ALL over them!!
And here it is complete, minus the furniture!! Isn't it gorgeous?
And I'd been looking for new lamps for months and finally found some a couple of weeks ago! You can see one in this pic! And we bought matching pillows! Instead of buying a large area rug and hiding the new floor, we bought rugs to go just in front of the couch and chair. I like them a lot!
This one's a little dark but you can see the general idea of the room.
And this was the completion of the living room overhaul. We have zillions of photos and up until this, we didn't have ANY photos of the kids up. We put this setup together over the weekend and the photos came in today. I LOVE IT!
Another shot of it...that bottom right frame is not white. The 2 at the bottom are silver.