I'm Walking On Sunshine!

When I last left you, the walls were up and we had already started painting.

When they were working on the walls we decided to start laying our floor.

We had previously decided to do a bamboo flooring that would coordinate with our upstairs hardwood floors. Originally we were going to leave the family room carpet and just put wood flooring at the bottom of the stairs and into the new piano room. When we found some flooring that we liked, we just decided to do it all. Go for the gold...right?! Truthfully, what was the breaking point was we found some flooring at Lumber Liquidators and it was being done away with. The chance of never being able to find the wood, if we changed our mind, was what did it.
We moved all of the furniture and toys and crap to one side of the room and started taking up the carpet and baseboards.

Underneath our carpet was...Surprise...peel and stick tile.

I probably shouldn't have been shocked, but I was, a little. On top of the peel and stick tile they had put some sort of glue to hold the carpet pad down. Only problem was, I couldn't clean the glue off, I tried, and the glue was still sticky. Tacky sticky. It was pretty gross. Instead of taking up the tile, which would have taken a good long while, we decided to lay the wood over the top of the tile.

We ordered some underlayment for the floor when we ordered the wood. It is supposed to help with sound and water.

We used some spacers and started laying the floor.

It wasn't necessarily quick work, but it wasn't horrible either. When Blake and I were working together we were definitely faster then me doing it on my own.

We worked in sections pulling up the carpet, pad, tack strips, and baseboards so that we wouldn't have too much tile exposed since it was sticky

and we were still having to "live" in the area.

Cutting around all the little nooks and crannies was the most time consuming.

When half of the room was done we moved the furniture over and started working on the other half of the room.

The wood extends all the way into the new piano room.

By the end, we just wanted it to be done so we worked really hard one weekend to finish it.

With the wood floors in and the walls painted it finally looked like a room.

By removing the carpet in the family room, it occurred to Blake and I that we no longer had any carpet in our house.

Eventually, we plan on carpeting the two back rooms but for now we are quite happy to have the nasty carpet out of the house.

It is amazing the difference it has made!

Before:

After:

Before:

After:

And just to really rock your world...

Really Before:

and After:

Really Before:

and After: