first floor renovation | flooring days and snow

As the end of 2016 is quickly coming to a close, I have given myself the goal of finishing my first floor renovation series. We are almost finished with our second renovation job (ie tree falling on house) so it is really way over due. That being said, I am seasoned enough into motherhood to know everyday is different and that things often don't go as planned...

*This series was written while we were undergoing construction several months ago - hence the present tense. If you missed the first post of this series check it out here , second here, third here and fourth. 

On Monday of this week, the drywall crew returned for a quick sand and then turned the project over to the hardwood flooring guys. There were no hardwoods under the old pantry and closet so new boards had to be feathered in. Not a big job but about two days of demo and re-laying. 

On Wednesday, we woke up to about 3" of very wet snow and news of a bunch of power outages. The floor guys called and said they won't be able to make it over and I began planning a lovely snow day of movies and cooking for Jeff and I. Then we lost power...We tried to make the best of the day by going to lunch and then a movie, waiting to see if the power would return. At about 6pm, the power company posted that they planned to have power back on by 10:00pm the next day!

With no heat and a dark house, we decided to go to a friends house for the night. We had already been planning on moving out of the house the next day as I, the 7 month pregnant lady, could not be around the refinishing fumes. The bigger issue then became how the hardwoods guy would be able to work without power....

Luckily, they had a generator and the power came back on around noon on Thursday. This meant they were only a day behind schedule and we could come back to the house on Saturday. So we spent Wednesday to Saturday at our friends who so generously took us and the dog in. 

With the snow and the hardwoods being freshly stained, no other work was done for the week which was a bummer. This put us at about two weeks of feeling like things were moving sort of slowly which in a projected 4 week project can be hard to not get anxious about.  I, however, did my best not to nag our contractor too much as he has not let us down yet. I think I was somewhat successful...

cement tile
june 16, 2014

flooring decisions
october 15, 2014

stair runner reveal!!
may 13, 2015

stair runner reveal!!

A bit delayed because of our vacation but here it is - the stair runner reveal!

To recap, when we bought the house it had carpet up the stairs onto the landing and into two of the bedrooms. 

It smelled and was all around gross so it was gone before we even moved in. And I can't believe this but I don't have a single picture of what the stairs looked like once the carpet was removed! Needless to say they were pretty nasty - layers of paint, lots of holes and very noticeably uneven.

Because of the state of the stairs, I knew we had to paint them verse try to refinish the wood. I have always liked a black tread with a white riser so that was an easy first decision. For the runner, I initially liked the idea of a geometric or strip but with how uneven our stairs are we ultimately nixed that idea in favor of a solid. Then we did nothing about it for a couple of months...I finally ordered gray wool sisal in November which arrived to our installer mid-December.

It wasn't till February that I and my team of helpers started prepping the stairs for painting. We sanded and filled and then sanded and filled some more. I finally started painting around the end of March. Seeing as it was going to be much more difficult to paint the surrounding walls after the stairs were done, I decided to add that to the project list as well.

Once the walls and baseboards were given a fresh coat of white paint, I painted the risers white and then finally the day before install I painted the treads black. I still need to do some touch up but for the most part the stairs are good to go! I am very pleased with how it turned out although the area definitely needs to be warmed up with art and lighting. I also purchased antique brass stair rods which are in the images below. They still need to be cut to size and properly installed but I don't mind them just propped in place. 

It feels great to finally have this project (most of the way) complete and as per usual my mind is already onto the next to do list. 

new flooring today!

Today is a little like Christmas morning - our mountain grass flooring is being installed! And with some much appreciated/needed help from good friends, I got the room painted too! 

Ripping up the carpet was literally the first thing we did in the house so seeing the project completed in both the office and no longer the "project room" feels like we are making some real progress. We will still have the stairs to work on - repair, paint and have the flooring guys install the already purchased runner - but we even managed to get started on that project this week as well! In fact, we have gotten so much accomplished in the past couple weeks I need to make a new list of what to tackle next!

To recap our flooring project, we started with carpet running up the stairs onto the landing and into the office and what was the master bedroom. This was just before Labor Day.

After the carpet was ripped up it looked like this....taken over Labor Day weekend.

We then hand scraped and sanded the landing as the boards were too thin to use a mechanical sander on. We added a rug, buffet piece and lamp and now the landing looks like this...

I did a good amount of searching and sourcing for our stair runner and I wrote this post. Then two months later, I wrote this post about how our plans had changed from painting the floor in the old master/stinky/project room to installing sea grass and how our original thought of doing a stripped runner wouldn't work for us.

In November, I finally pulled the trigger and ordered the below mountain grass for the office and project room and a gray wool sisal for the stair runner(both from Fibreworks).

The mountain grass was backordered until early December and with our own scheduling issues as well as our installer being super busy we made a plan for install in January. That, of course, brings us today and as I write this they have just arrived!

Lots of progress pics to come next week! Have a great weekend everyone!