Living Room Update

Check out the House Tour tab up top to see what our wood floors look like in the living room!  Sans furniture, which hides it all, of course....

Bathroom Progress

In the midst of having my dad stay with us while I went into labor and had Cassidy, we wanted to make some progress putting the first floor bathroom back together again.  Since we replaced the floor, we have just had a toilet and sink loosely floating around the bathroom.  My intent was to paint awesome stripes on the wall before putting it all back together, but we didn't get to it in time, and with a C-section, I needed to be able to get to the bathroom without climbing stairs all the time.  So, dad was awesome enough to scrape off that great wallpaper that you might remember from this "before" picture.

Old faucet, pink walls, "lovely" wallpaper border, cheap flooring

Then, I picked out a few colors for reference and got everyone's input

Finally, I picked two colors (Ivory Mist #1 and Hazelnut Cream #2 from Behr) and dad and Jon painted the base coat (Ivory Mist) on the wall.  We didn't have time to get the Hazelnut Cream stripe on before Cassidy made her way into the world, so the stripes will have to wait, but already, what a difference!  The toilet got re-installed with the sink coming soon and Jon promised to pull them out again for my stripes when I'm back in a place where I can start painting.  You can also see that the new laminate flooring (Highland Hickory from the HD) is in as well.

After putting in the toilet and sink again, Jon and Dad also put up the old mirror (yuck) but installed brand new "brushed nickel" accessories like a new faucet, towel rack and toilet paper holder.

A trio of beautiful brushed nickel accessories

Next step: Put the stripes on the wall, although that requires Jon to remove the toilet and sink again, so I have to let him forget how painful that is first before I can talk him into doing it again.  In the meantime, I'll be looking for great art and a color scheme for this little sanctuary.  Oh, and of course, replacing this....

Your days are numbered, my friend.....

What do you think so far?  I've updated the House Tour page as well so you can track our progress!

From the Ground Up

Close to the top of our list of things to get done in the new house first was flooring.  We didn't want to put furniture in, then move it all out to do floors and move it BACK in.  Yuck.  So, pre-move-in was our best option.

The living room was covered in clean, but stained, carpet:

The dining room and kitchen have in-good-condition, but ugly, linoleum:

So we set out to Lowe's, Home Depot, AND Lumber Liquidators in search of the perfect wood flooring.  There are SO many choices from real hardwood (softer, but can be refinished, but more expensive) to laminate (harder, but can't be refinished, but cheaper) to cork (soft and quirky) and bamboo (love it, but pricey).  I mean, your head really just explodes trying to decide, and even taking and buying samples of the wood to look at in your house still makes it hard.

So. Many. Choices.

After collecting all of THOSE samples, we found even more stores in the DC/NOVA area to hit up.  Which, of course, led to more samples.

Avery gets into the testing phase

We narrowed it down to a few, and, viewing them in different lights and getting advice from my friend, Andrea, we decided we really liked one in particular from a store called Rick's near us.

It's the lightest of the three large samples pictures above.  We were rolling with the middle color (not too dark, not too light, just Goldilocks enough for us) but Andrea pointed out how that one looked in evening light, and it just looked a little cheaper than the nice tone it gave off in the bright light.  Since our house isn't well-lit to begin with, we didn't want to stare at cheapy looking floors all the time.  the lighter color was the same brand, and although lighter than what we originally were looking floor, didn't change much in different lights.  We also enjoyed the rustic looking vibe of the lighter color, which showed the "knots" in the "wood" off.  Home Depot has a similar (and cheaper!) style and color called Highland Hickory, but, of course, all the samples were gone at both Home Depots near us. 

In all honesty, it was exhausting and quickly became no fun when trying to decide.  But eventually, my rationale was "Something you buy a house with wood floors, and you just go with it and tailor your house around them, so just get something you like and go with it!"  After reiterating this mantra and making some eliminations, we decided to go with the Highland Hickory from Home Depot. 

Pergo makes this, and we chose it for several reasons.  Not just for color, which is how I pick my football teams.

Pros to this flooring:  Super durable and cheaper than hardwood flooring, and it looks great!

Cons to this flooring:  We can't refinish it, like you can hardwood.

So, little by little, Jon was able to start cutting and clicking in our new floor!

We didn't have the time to put the new laminate in the kitchen before move-in date, so that's still on our list.  BUT, we are SOOO happy to have the floors so close to being done in the living room.  They look amazing, really open up the space, and feel great!  With just a little bit of the trim and stuff left to go, we should be done in no time!

Love That New Carpet Smell

Our carpet came in and was installed this past weekend, and it's awesome.  Not to mention, it smells great.

Remember how the upstairs bedrooms started?  Well, now we've got new carpet in!  No more dingy, stained carpet with that oh-so-nice ring around the room.  The carpet we agonized over has been laid down, and Jon has touched up the trim!  (the great thing being that since we'll repaint all the walls, he didn't have to spend a lot of time being careful!)  So here's some befores and afters for comparison!

First is Avery's future room:

Old, stained carpet and dingy trim

Nice fresh carpet and touched up trim

Next is the new baby (Cassidy?)'s room:

And finally, the master!

Now, the difference is subtle in pictures, but there's no long a ring around each room of dirty, stained carpet.  It's new, soft, and great-smelling!  Jon's also touched up all of the trim, so it's a brighter, cleaner, more universal white - hooray!

I've updated the House Tour page (click the tab at the top of the page!) with this first before/after reveal.  On to the next project!!

Floor preview!

I know I usually don't post on Saturdays, but we are getting our carpet in today and Jon's been working on the floors so I wanted to post a little preview.

LOVE LOVE LOVE IT!

Carpet Conundrum

Making design decision  is supposed to be fun.  Sigh.  It's not.  Home Depot came out and measured our house for carpet, so all we had to do was pick one.  Avery had his favorite:

C'mon folks, red shag is awesome!!

 But for the ones with the credit cards, we were trying to decide between loop and twist.  As you might know, or might be able to gather, loop carpet is exactly that, it's carpet where the pieces are looped down.  Something like this:

Throw rug for me for a loop!  Cheesy.

See how all that sticks up are the curved parts of the loop?  The great thing about loop carpet is that it's really durable, which we like, because we'll inevitably be renting this place out.  We also personally like this because we feel it looks a little more grown-up and neater than twist carpet.  The downsides of loop carpet are that it's usually not as soft as twist carpet.  Additionally, and a HUGE deal for us is that cute little kitty cats like to dig their claws into carpet (as we all know).  One they un-loop a looped piece, you can't loop it again, so it becomes obvious that the carpet has been slightly damaged.  We have a cat with claws, and we'd like to be able to rent out the townhouse to people with pets, because the DC area seems to have very few pet-friendly places to rent.

Twist carpet is your more traditional carpet, where each pieces ends sticking up.  Like so:

Come on baby, let's do the....ok, I'm stopping.

Twist carpet is softer on your toes than loop carpet, but less durable.  It also shows the indent of beds/dressers a lot more than loop carpet does.  But, if a cat scratches it, you can just trim it down and you're back to new.

So, what's a couple to do but try to make these two carpets have a little carpet baby and combine them?  Enter "Pattern" carpet.  Oooooooooohhhhh.

No joke here.  I promised to stop. 

Yep, it's a pattern.  The lighter parts aren't really lighter, they are looped.  The darker parts aren't really darker, they are twist.  It's kind of best of both worlds, so we liked it, but we didn't like the actual pattern.  I didn't necessarily want shells or leaves or squares or something all over my floor.  So here's what we found at the HD (Home Depot).

A trio of pattern carpet

This is the "Insightful" line.  They are numbered (from the top) I, II, and III.  Roman numerals means they are fancier.  And you can see that each pattern carpet has its own pattern.  We studied these a lot:

And we really liked the "Insightful III" which had the least amount of patten in it.  Still a loop/twist combo, but it didn't make such a distinctive squares pattern all over the floor.  Basically, more twists than loops, and scattered instead of placed in a pattern.  So it won't look too patterned, but will still give us some of the benefits of the loop.  And the best part?

On sale!  Sure, 22 cents doesn't seem like a lot, but when you're carpeting stairs, a hall, and three upstairs bedrooms, all those 22 cent increases count, so we will take what we can get.  Now it was down to color.

That's a lotta beige!

Avery was still holding out for the red, but we were looking at something that didn't make such a bold statement.  Luckily, HD had replenished their dwindling supplies of laminate samples, so we grabbed a sample of the laminate that we bought for our hard woods to just hold it next to the carpet samples.

And Linen wins!  We are going for a very neutral, but warm-neutral look in our new place, and we really liked how these floors complimented each other.  (The laminate is "Highland Hickory" from HD).  From there, all that was left to do was pick a padding.  My work was pretty much done, so Jon and the HD guy talked it over and we went with the Nike (yep, like the shoes) padding.

In case you didn't know, it's a step ahead.  It's also got ground up pieces of shoes or something in it.  Anyway, add another 69 cents a square foot to our bill.  This will make our stairs and bedrooms feel nice and soft to step on in the morning.  Or any time of day, really.

With the decisions made, the order went in!  Now we just wait for the carpet to come in, the guys to call us to schedule installation, and the date to arrive when we get to flood our house with that awesome new carpet smell - yay!!

Tore Up From The Floor Up

Cheesy title, but I couldn't help it.  Things are being pulled up!  The laminate flooring in the entryway (lovely linoleum underneath - barf)...

And in the half bath on the first floor...

As is the carpet on the stairs and living room...

The upstairs hall...

And the bedrooms...

We've picked out flooring for the main room and new carpet for the stairs/bedrooms.  Stay tuned to what we went with - just wanted to get these pictures out there!