Downstairs Bedroom: Carpet Issues & Our Plan

When we bought our house we knew right away that we were not a fan of the carpet in the bedroom. The bedroom is right off the kitchen I couldn't stand the site of the it. Everything about it was terrible and it needed to go. The hubs and I knew it since we bought the house and needless to say it didn't take us long to remove it...only 4 1/2-ish years. Not long, right? Nope. That's a very reasonable amount of time to hate something.

So the night before New Years Eve, we decided to see what was under this carpet. Initially we thought..."How tough can it be. It's just carpet...there is NO way it can be difficult like some of our other projects. We will just pull up the carpet and the carpet pad, roll it up and take it outside..wham.bam.done." NOPE. Why would THIS be easy? It was WAY more work then we expected. After slowly peeling back the carpeting we began to notice that the carpet pad was glued to the wood floors. Our. Worst. Nightmare.

Once realizing it wasn't going to be that easy I just wanted to put the carpet back down and cover it with some furniture, but we knew that we were at the point of no return and had to continue pulling it up....

But we were happy that the original wood floors were in there. We managed to figure out that if we used a flat-head shovel and scrape up the section of carpet pad. After about 30-45 minutes we managed to get up a 6x8ft section and it was smooth sailing from there!

I went through and was peeling/shoveling up the padding and rolling the carpet as I went. Then we ran into our next hiccup. About half way through the room we noticed several sections of the floor that were patched with plywood. The hubs and I concluded that the room used to be two rooms and those patched areas were from where the old heat vents used to be. Needless to say we the hubs has some patch work to do. At first we were kind of overwhelmed by the idea of patching the floors ourselves, but frankly my husband is pretty damn handy.

We were nervous about finding the right type of wood to match, or get as close as we could to what we already have in that room and while at Menards we stumbled upon some unfinished wood flooring that was a pretty decent price and would be the closest match so we snatched it up. He pulled up the boards that he could. To make it easier he cut down the middle of a board, then pulled out each side from the surrounding boards.

Our plan is to feather them in so the area that is patched blends in more with the surrounding flooring, which we just started last night.  We aren't done patching, not even close, but I can't wait.

I am SO excited about all of this, but I am most excited about the windows. Speaking of windows...we got them. On sale. In the past we have gotten quotes for windows and one company wanted to charge us $1,000 dollars to install ONE window. We were able to purchase 10 windows for just a few hundred more dollars then the price it would cost us to have that local company install ONE window. On top of the windows, that are now in our office for the time being and will soon make their permanent home installed in roughly 48 days (but I'm not counting or anything).

So here's the list:

• Pull up the remaining carpet
• Patch the floor
• Sand, stain and seal the floor
• Replace the windows & the trim around them
• Wainscoting
• Paint the trim
• Crown moulding
• Replace the fans with some funky lighting

I love those pendant lights and think they will be a great improvement over the fans that we have in there.

Once this room is done I think it will be one of the biggest transformations that we've done...Now to just find the time.