(according to my dashboard this hasn’t been published yet so if this has been re-sent to you, I apologize)

living room re-do

Finally, some remodeling pictures to post. The very day we started ripping up the tile, my mom came over to visit. I had stopped by her house earlier and asked her to come over and have a glass of iced-tea.

I saw her pull-up in my driveway and went out to meet her.  As she stepped up on the first step to come inside, she slipped on the concrete and hit her head hard on the concrete. She didn’t lose consciousness but was bleeding from her head.  Thank goodness she didn’t lose consciousness but she did suffer from verigo for about three months.

It is now six months later and she is well on her way to recovery but seeing as she was unsteady on her feet even before she fell, I don’t anticipate she will get any better than she was before the accident.

Anyway, you can imagine what my next few weeks were like. My husband had a fishing trip planned with my son the next week and I insisted that he go ahead.  So after visits to the hospital, I would come home and rip up tile. I could only carry about ten tiles at once so there were countless trips to the garage.

In the meantime, we had already hired a contractor to begin doing some work on the second floor. To say I had a lot going on all at once is to put it mildly. Anyway, it’s done and it’s beautiful.  Here’s the pictures.

This first picture shows the tile that covered the hardwood floors. To the right you will see some carpet. There is also carpet next the staircase. The former owners had a wood burning stove in the fireplace and brought in the firewood from what we call our “sunroom”, a former porch. There are doors leading outside. Rather than drag firewood over the carpet, they essentially made a wide tile “path” from the door to the fireplace. It was kind of cool and certainly made our home unique. However, the tile was cracking and I broke a couple pieces checking out the floor underneath. So……….

The next few pictures show various stages of demolition.

If you look in front of the fireplace you will see that we uncovered a beautiful flagstone hearth. We had no idea it was there.  We were thrilled but it took us a total of forty hours to get off all the cement and mastic. I was on my knees so long, I suffered an injury to my knee that still isn’t healed.

We contracted the refinishing of the floor. Here’s the floor with the beginning stages of the poly. The dark spot is the area the contractor stained to show me the color. I am in love!

These next pictures show the finished floor.  The floor is wet here but I chose a matte finish and so it is considerably less shiny than what shows here.

After the floors were done, we re-painted walls, trim and fireplace in both rooms. (They are  big rooms with ten foot ceilings.  Yikes!) We painted the same colors.  Reason?  I was too chicken to go white and the colors are very neutral. Trim is Behr’s Cottage White which is my favorite new white. The picture above was taken after we painted the living room. The staircase is not completely done yet. We are working on the upstiars and will be replacing carpet on stairs so am waiting for that to get done. The bannister and newel post is black.

These are pictures taken at Christmas and a couple after Christmas. I forogt to mention that the pillow below is made from a skirt I bought at Goodwill. Now the part about the waistband should make some sense.