Anyway, back to the carpet.
Cream colored carpet, to be exact.
Who would put cream colored carpet in a house?? Especially in a dining room?? A dining room, for Pete's sake! That's what boggles my mind the most... the dining room. It makes absolutely no logical sense. So you can imagine how awful these cream colored carpets were after 5 years of living. No amount of carpet cleaning would get them clean, and I cleaned them often, even resorting to having the professional carpet cleaners come in a couple times. Even they couldn't get the carpet stains out.
I would sit and daydream about having nice clean flooring. In a house I didn't even own yet at the time. But I would think about how nice this house would look with beautiful hard wood flooring, and since I can see the images in my mind so clearly it was soooo hard not to rip the carpets up right then and there! But at that time I couldn't. So I soothed the savage beast by gleefully pinning pins of wonderful gorgeous colonial homes on Pinterest. Makes logical sense, right? When you can't do something, simply torture yourself further by pinning pins on Pinterest.
So you can imagine how excited I was when we bought the house and I could actually rip these suckers out!
Here is a before shot of the dining room carpeting that was taken before I put the new chandelier up. The picture makes the carpet look nice here, but trust me, the stains were horrible and they drove me insane.
I forgot to get a before picture of the living room carpet... Big fail on my part. I guess I was just too excited about ripping the carpet out. That's my story and I'm sticking to it anyway. It wasn't at all because I simply forgot, per se.... It was just excitement! See how that works? One makes me sound motivated, the other makes me sound like an idiot. I will go with motivated. Motivated Moose. Yeah. :D
So here is a picture of the living room that was taken kind of awhile ago. Like 3 years ago or something.... Back when we had old furniture and not the nice new furniture we have now. But it was good comfy furniture.... I actually kind of miss that sectional sofa. It gave us so much sitting room in such a small room. But that couch doesn't hold a candle to the couch we have now. Anyway, I'm going off on a rabbit trail.... You can see that I used a rug to help cover the stains.
But back to the actual reason for this post. Ripping out carpets! :D
I grabbed my son and we set out pulling up carpet. His job was to take the carpet and put it outside by the curb for trash pick up the next day. The first thing we did was move the dining room furniture into the kitchen and then move the living room furniture into the now empty dining room. The living room carpet was the first to go.
(On a side note - putting the living room furniture in the dining room showed how amazing the wall color went with the furniture! It looked so good that I decided I was going to paint the living room the color I painted the kitchen and dining room. This of course means that I have decided to repaint the kitchen and dining room walls a new different color now. My husband rolled his eyes at me when I excitedly told him about this. He's thrilled about it; I just know it! Well, I'm excited about it anyway. He's just a party pooper.)
After yanking up a section of carpet I rolled over a 3 foot section and cut it to make disposal easier.
I then rolled up the carpet piece and taped it. My son then took it to the curb while I started cutting the next segment.
Goodbye, nasty ugly carpet!
In the next picture, Emma, one of our "rescue kittens" that isn't a kitten anymore, perched herself on the top of the tipped over couch in the dining room and kept an eye on our work.
After all of the carpet, padding, carpet nail strips, and staples were out in the living room we then put the living room furniture back in the living room to get started on the dining room. This was when my daughter took over for my son and she was in charge of taking the carpet segments out to the curb.
After the dining room carpet, padding, carpet nail strips, and staples were removed and cleared out I was beat. It was a lot of hard work and I was sooo sore. I was sore in places I didn't know I had places! More than that though, I was tired. My parents were awesome and brought over supper for the kids and I. Paul was out of town that day and couldn't be the gopher. He actually called them up and asked them if they could help me with that. So he's good too. :) Anyway, I was too beat to cook, so I was very thankful. I was actually even too tired to eat but I swallowed it down anyway.
The very next day Paul and I got started laying the new flooring, which was the same as the new hallway flooring - Shaw Resilient Matrix vinyl plank flooring in Resort Teak color. We were going to power through it to get it finished as soon as possible.
The above picture is where we stopped and smacked our heads for being stupid. We started on the opposite side of the floor before realizing that we were putting the flooring in backwards. Still doable, but not as easy. Plus we also then realized that if we continued that way we wouldn't be able to attach it to the edge of the new floor where we left off from the hallway and foyer. Lots of grumbling at this moment, but glad we caught it early and not halfway across the room. So we stopped, left it where it was, and then got to work on the other side of the room.
We also decided at this point that we wanted a thin padding under the floor because we also discovered the floor where the plywood met another piece of plywood wasn't completely level, which is not good for vinyl plank flooring. So off to the hardware store we went.
After laying the floor pad and flooring to the point of getting into the dining room we then had to work backwards to match it up with the kitchen linoleum. That was more difficult but it still went in rather easy.
The cats enjoyed watching us as we worked from the tipped over couch on the opposite side of the living room. Emma was lost watching the ceiling fan.... yeah, she's not the sharpest little kitty, but she's a good kitty. :D
We got halfway through the floor when we stopped for the night. We were both exhausted but determined to finish it the next day. My dad came over and helped as well and it went much faster with him there. And of course I forgot to get pictures of more progress. Motivated Moose, right?? Right! :D
So here's the finish of the flooring! Isn't it gorgeous? It's so much nicer than that nasty carpet!
We still have to add shoe molding but that will have to wait until another day.
And here are pictures after we put our furniture back in place.
A thousand times better! I love how easy it is to clean, and I love not seeing carpet stains anymore. I think the cats are having fun running and sliding all over it too, which cracks me up! I swear they are doing it on purpose to play.
The colonial look is starting to take shape! Next big project is finishing the kitchen cabinets. I've been working on painting the cabinets for about a month now. Paint, dry, flip. Paint, dry, flip... it takes a long time. But I won't get into that in this blog post. Just focus on that beautiful new flooring!
After the furniture was put back in place Paul asked me, "Does it look just how you envisioned it?"
"Yes, yes it does." :)
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