Family room reno: week four

Happy Friday! Two things to be excited about today. First of all, the weekend, duh. Secondly, by the end of the day today the work on the family room will be DONE! Whooooo! Well, the work by other people. Mine has just begun.

Here’s an update on where we stand! Last week the flooring guy came and patched the floors:

He did SUCH a good job. To make them look seamless he recommended sanding down the entire area and restaining – especially since we added the spot where the island was too. He said smaller spots are OK to just stain/poly, but bigger ones like this would look better if everything was redone.

Here’s a bigger shot of the three areas he patched:

Monday he came out and sanded:

I’m always tempted to just poly them and leave them this color – the natural wood is so pretty!

And then Tuesday and Wednesday were stain and poly days. This is what the rest of the main floor looked like till last night:

If you follow me on Instagram, yes I found my keys. Yesterday. They were in the garage. :)

It’s ALL worth it though…here they are in their finished glory:

The ceiling has been patched and painted and now there’s absolutely NO sign that a wall was ever there! YES!!

Here’s a shot from mud room into the whole space:

Instead of moving everything back in first thing yesterday I got to work. I took down the molding on the walls:

It’s been up for eight years now – it’s time to go. This is that “foamy” molding I told you about years ago. It will be replaced with the board and batten look that’s in the office.

While I was at it I took the trim down from around the two doors in the room:

I’m replacing them with my craftsman trim I’ve been slowly adding around the house:

Still have some work to do. ;)

You’ll notice the new baseboards too – our old ones were impossibly small. Since we didn’t remove them when the floors went in years ago they looked even smaller:

Because 1.) our base is so hard to remove (the builders used two inch heavy duty nails every few inches) and 2.) with the hardwoods down it’s hard to remove them without damaging the floors – I have to get creative when it comes to beefing up the base. You can see my master bedroom solution here.

Because I’m adding the board and batten around the room I added a horizontal board along the top of the old baseboards and then placed the new base over that. I explained the process more in this post with pictures, but here it is after:

I finished up the family room space, just have to do the kitchen area. They look a little wonky now but it will make more sense when the vertical boards go up. :)

I finished up some smaller projects too, like adding a decorative trim to the built ins. Here’s the unfinished before:

And after with some trim:

 

The sides will get some trim that will cover all those seams. One step at a time. :)

And all is right with the world now that the island is back in the kitchen. Even though it does look like an art project gone wrong:

Isn’t it PRETTY? This poor island has been through so many makeovers. To get it out they had to tear off the decorative beadboard. At least I will be spurred on to get the island extension done sooner than later now. ;)

I wasn’t able to move it too much from it’s original position, but we now have quite a bit more space between the cabinets and the island – I wanted to move it out since I plan to extend it. I didn’t want the oven area to be cramped when we opened it.

So far…SO GOOD!! I hope you’ll be patient with me as I begin my portion of this work now…I want it done fast but it takes me a while.

By the way, we’re definitely moving the kitchen table – you can see this post for more on that. I think the open space by the bay window is going to be AWESOME now that I’ve had some time to get used to it.

Have a great weekend everybody! I’ll be painting!!

Family room – almost there!

Well hey there! We’re heading into week four of our family room renovation and I wanted to give you my weekly update. First of all – the whole it will cost more and take longer than you think thing? Yep. I thought this process would take maybe two weeks. It was on track to be done by the end of this week (three weeks in) but the sander the flooring guy uses is being fixed and that will push us back. So by next Wednesday I hope to have a “completed” room. Completed in that the construction is done – then my to do list starts and it’s a doozy. :)

After they are done I can start on the wall treatment, baseboards, priming and painting the fireplace and tiling it as well. Oh, and painting the whole room and kitchen. I honestly can’t wait.

Today two big things are happening – the floors are getting patched!:

I can’t wait to see this process! Our guy is feathering in new boards, then will sand down the entire room and restain and poly. Smaller areas he’s OK with just feathering and not redoing the entire floor, but he said it looks a ton better to just redo the whole area.

We have three areas total. The one above where the long wall was, a tiny spot where another one was near our mud room, and the last minute addition is this one:

Back when we had the fridge leak (that resulted in these beautiful hardwoods) we had the island put down before the floors. I immediately regretted that but it was too late. We were just so happy to have our island back in place after weeks of mess. :)

But the whole kitchen redo I've had planned for years involves a bigger island, so I will be building on to our current one. I want to move it away from the fridge and cabinets just a bit – maybe six inches both ways.

The floors won’t be sanded and stained till next week but by tonight we’ll have smooth floors and won’t trip in holes, so that is AWESOME.

The big progress has happened over by the fireplace. I showed you this pic early on I think:

Here’s how that area above the fireplace looks now:

Well, actually, they installed the board in the middle yesterday so I primed and caulked last night:

The TV bracket will hang in that little alcove, so when it’s hanging it will look flush with the wall. I didn’t want to see the big bracket and I’m hoping this helps. The audio/visual guy comes today to finish all that up – for the first time ever I’m going to have someone else hang one of our TVs and it’s pretty awesome. :) (He is installing a wireless program too so it just made sense to have him do it all.)

The lighting is DONE and I’m SO HAPPY. They put in two directional lights over the fireplace – we had them before but I chose four inch lights this time. (Just for this spot – they are expensive!):

Since the ceiling was already opened up and we were doing drywall repairs anyway, we went ahead and had recessed lights installed as well – six to be exact:

Holy cats, that is seriously awesome. LOVE it. We have two in the old office area and it’s the perfect amount of light – and of course it’s all on dimmers. :) It’s so nice in here at night! My husband was so excited for it to get dark that night, it was hilarious.

MY favorite part is the fireplace area. This is my inspiration as a reminder:

I love it for many reasons, but especially because it has the same deep fireplace that we are dealing with. After studying the photo for a bit I asked the guys to beef up the tops of the side cabinets. They did a great job:

Those cabinets are just stock uppers from Lowe’s – are you surprised? They’re my favorite. ;) I wanted them deeper than 12 inches though so they could hold the TV components – so they beefed them up from the inside. You can’t even tell they were 12 inchers:

Brilliant. They even took out the adjustable laminate shelves and rebuilt nicer, thicker ones. I love them! I’ll cut out the fronts of the doors and replace the wood with metal sheeting like this – I have to do that so the components can breath.

So by the end of today, provided all goes well, we will have flat floors and the TV and speakers will be hooked up again. This means I can finally arrange all the furniture just the way I want it – I’m very excited for tonight. :)

I’ll get all that moved just in time to move it all back out next week so he can sand and stain. :)

Everything is going GREAT – I’ve been so pleased with the process and all the contractors. There’s only one hiccup so far – they had to tear the island apart to get it out. It looked like this:

And now it looks like this:

I nearly teared up, not gonna lie. This poor island has been redone so many dang times. Now the island extension idea may happen sooner than I thought. :)

We are nearing the end – WHOO! The costs really haven’t been that bad at all. We only increased the plan a bit when things like the lights came up. We’re adding some sound system stuff that is a little extra too, but other than that this reno is insanely cheaper than our original plan of adding on to the house.

Thanks for sharing my excitement along the way! :)

Hardwood floors in the bedroom

Hello my friends! Welcome to another (cold!) week! Hope you had a great weekend – my husband was out of town and I had finally recovered from the stomach flu, so my boy and I went out and took advantage of our beautiful weather here on Saturday. We did our Indy children’s museum, the zoo and the state museum all in one day. It was SO wonderful to get out without coats!

I’m super stoked about the new floors that were installed in our bedroom over the weekend! We are slowly moving this house over to hardwoods throughout – it started with a bum fridge that leaked all over our laminate floors years ago. Because of that insurance check we were able to pull out the carpet on the main floor and put in hardwoods throughout. We do finished on site wood and I explained why I love them and the pros and cons here. They do take longer to install than engineered floors, so there’s more patience needed. :)

We got a quote about a year ago to have them put in upstairs but it was more than we wanted to spend at the time, so we decided to break it up. We started with the master because the carpets were truly, truly gross. Four animals and ten years tend to do that.

On Friday they pulled the carpet and tact strips out and then laid the floor in a few hours:

We use white oak, three inch wide boards. Back when we had them put in downstairs I wanted wider planks but was warned against them with our Midwest climate (that sometimes changes 30 degrees in 24 hours) because of buckling. I quite love the three inch though – they are classic.

They use wood filler on the floor and then let that dry overnight.

The next day the meticulous sanding is done and then the first coat of stain goes down. Yesterday he came back and I’m pretty sure he buffs the floor again just a bit because that first coat of stain usually has some imperfections. Then the coat of poly goes on and by last night it was dry:

The poly doesn’t completely cure for a few days or even weeks but I may start moving a few things in later today. As long as you don’t drag items around it’s fine.

As always we went with the Jacobean stain by Minwax and a satin poly:

The satin poly makes my life SO much easier (instead of a glossy) – you don’t see foot prints on them at all. It makes a HUGE difference!

Our room is big, but it looks massive without any furniture! It makes me want to just put our bed back in and that’s it:

The floors will darken just a bit over time but this stain is a good color – not crazy dark but dark enough that it contrasts against the white trim. My very favorite thing. :)

So if I was a better planner and if I hadn’t been hit with the bug last week, I would have tried to do things like paint the walls in the room before the floors were installed and pull up the old baseboards as well. Our base is installed so dang well it makes me sweat and swear to get them out.

Now that the floors are in they are going to be even harder to get out:

Grrr. I so should have done that before! I was just going to extend them using some molding but I am doing a wall treatment and really want to have a different base. So, we’ll see. As anxious as I am to sleep in our comfy bed again, I may try to do this while everything is out of the room. Makes most sense, it’s just hard for my impatient brain to accept. :)

So I have a ton of work to get this room back in order but I LOVE the floors! And I can’t wait for this to arrive tomorrow:

I hope it looks as good as I think it will! I got it 70 percent off last week and it looks like it’s 50 percent off right now!

So could you live with hardwoods in the bedroom? We’re not sure yet if we’ll do hard floors in the other bedrooms someday or just replace the carpet. After seeing what came out of our carpet the other day I’m leaning towards hardwoods. ;) It will be an adjustment to walk around on hard floors in there but I think the rug will help quite a bit (I’m planning on picking up some padding to put under it today.)

So far I’m happy with this change – I’ll let you know if I still love it in a few months! :)

Paint and floors! (mud room progress)

Well when I said I wanted to get my hands dirty again I meant it. I worked my TAIL off on the mud room yesterday! Seven hours straight – it feels like I’ve barely made a dent and like it looks like a whole new room all at once.

My hand is now a claw from gripping the paint brush so long, but there’s progress!

After I installed the new door trim my next step was to figure out what color to go with on the beadboard in the room. I shared the options I was looking into on Facebook:

I was deciding between a navy blue tone and a more peacock blue color and went with the latter – I’m a little obsessed with that color. I used it as an accent in the powder room, in the basement bathroom and I’ve used it in the living room too. LOVE.

Thing is – painting beadboard is a major pain in the tuckus. Seriously up there with the most tedious jobs ever. I start by using a roller over the whole thing, not worrying about getting into the grooves. Then I take a thick, angled brush and fill in the “beads”:

I use lots of paint, don’t be afraid to lather it on there. You have to go over it a few times to smooth it all out and get any excess paint out. THIS is why I feel like my hand is permanently in the claw shape. ;)

This time, for what I think may be the first time, I painted my trim before I installed it. What WHUT? Yep. I ALWAYS install first, then paint, and I ALWAYS complain about painting after the fact. I still don’t know if I’m sold on the painting before thing. It did make it a little easier – I didn’t have to worry about taping anything off.

But I still had to fill nail holes and touch up paint that I usually don’t have to worry about. Since I used such a deep color, I knew filling the holes would leave a white spot I’d have to paint over a couple times, so I mixed up a bit of my putty with some paint:

That way it matched the wall color better. Even after it dried it was still a little lighter:

I wiped it with a wet rag and then just touched up those small areas. So, the jury’s still out on the paint or install first, at least for me. I think it may be a bit easier to paint first though. Maybe.

So the blue color is called Reflecting Pool by Ralph Lauren. I’ve had an old paint deck for years from when they sold it at Home Depot (I would get it mixed in Behr paint). This time I took it to Sherwin Williams and got it color matched. I do love it but it’s more color than I’m used to, that’s for sure! When I’m in the room it feels deep and pretty. When I’m in another room and walk into the mud room it feels BRIGHT. :) But Lordy…I’m not painting it again for awhile so I’ll get used to it:

I did something a little different this time – usually the white is on the beadboard and the color is on the walls. I wanted to flip it around this time and I really like it! Now I’m not sure the door will stay that color though. It’s always trial and error for me – I just have to figure it out along the way.

It takes me eons to put a room together but that’s because I have to think through every bit of it:

I’ve had half of the walls covered with the beadboard for years, but never finished it up because I was too lazy to move the washer and dryer back in the day:

Next up I need to continue that around to the rest of the room that will be the built in bench and storage:

Those holes are where we had the dryer vent and heavy duty outlet – still don’t think I’ll even cover those with drywall since I’ll be covering it all with beadboard.

Oh I almost forgot about my FAVORITE part! The new floors!! Our flooring guy put them in for a great price again, $300 for labor. Now that I’ve watched him do it a few times I feel like I may be able to do this myself. But they make it seem so easy – they move super fast and just two of them had the floor laid in a couple hours:

I still need to add some trim over by the utility doors – I was more concerned with how they met at the transition piece to the rest of the house than over there. We went with the Jacobean stain and a satin poly like we have on the rest of the main level. After living with hardwoods for a couple years now I would use them in just about any space – even one that gets wet shoes. They’ve held up incredibly well! Any time we’ve ever had water stand on them at all they may cup up a bit but then once they dry out they’re flat again.

You may remember I installed the peel and stick vinyl tiles in here years ago – and they held up OK. Not great, but OK. The “grout” area between the tiles easily discolored, which I didn’t like. And I don’t feel like they’d be great for an area that gets moisture – the water would easily get between them. But the tiles themselves looked pretty darn good, even after years of use. I just didn’t care for the way the the grout areas looked after all this time.

If you had told me a few years ago we’d put hardwoods in both a bathroom and the mud room I would have laughed – but I’m a convert. :)

Next up – finish up the rest of the beadboard (I was waiting to decide on the bench configuration), then figure out the trim that will go around the top of the beadboard: Oh and paint the door trim. :) Yay.

THEN I can start the bench! I’m so excited about that! 

I can’t wait to make more progress in this room – and to create more storage! I’m stoked.

I’m just glad the bright yellow and black is gone:

It served us well but I’m ready for I’m ready for a change!

NOW I’m off to clean my entire house. When we’re all here 24/7 it’s so hard to keep up with it!! I want to start the new year with a clean slate! I’ll be back a couple more times this week, talk with ya later. ;)

The new family room (rug)

Hey everybody! How are you? How was your weekend? I worked my TAIL off on the garage – decluttering and cleaning it out. It was years past due. I still have a bit more to do and then a big DIY project in there but it’s so so SO much better! My body is feeling it right now though.

But let’s switch gears, shall we? I’m tired of looking at dust and dirt and spiders (!!) and need to focus on soft and pretty. So the last time I shared our family room (I think it was earlier this year), it looked like this:

I got that rug from RugsUSA about a year and a half ago and it was holding up pretty darn well. The color of it is off in that pic, it was really more of a charcoal blue, not a navy blue.

I LOVED the design but it was so intense. It made decorating the rest of the room so hard. Pillows were impossible to find (the ones I had here were never quite right, they were from years back) and the drapes never worked with it. I looked forEVER for a new drapery fabric and nothing worked. These are what you called #firstworldproblems.

The graphic design was just too much for this room. At first I didn’t mind it but over time I just got tired of fighting with it. And earlier this year I was starting to think that we could really have a larger rug in there. This one is nearly 7 by 9 feet, but it almost looked dinky when you walked in the room.

Sooo…I’ve kind of been looking here and there over the six months or so. Nothing intense, just flipping through the rugs at HomeGoods when I went. Well, a few weeks back it was finally there…the one:

I was worried it was too big though – 9 by 12 compared to 7 by 9 is quite a jump. I got it anyway and figured the worst scenario was that we’d need to return it.

We moved everything out of the room (and cleaned under the sofas…what. in the?), laid it down and both my husband and I were drooling (well, more me, but he liked it) – it was SO pretty. And my goodness, so soft!

When we put the furniture back in we were a little shocked at how big it was, but about three minutes in were talking about how much bigger it made the room feel. It was crazytown:

The color works so much better! It’s a bluish gray and the design is an aqua color. It’s not too aqua that you can’t pull in other colors though, which I like.

My corner fireplace (shakes fists in air!!) continues to haunt me because it keeps the rug from working perfectly in the room – it could really move a lot further back if it weren’t for the fireplace placement. Ah well, I’m over it (lying):

Another thing that helps is that I took the little coffee table out earlier this year. I love that thing but this part of the room just wasn’t big enough for it. I tried taking it out one day and it was like we could breath in there – made such a big difference. (It’s living with my sister right now cause I couldn’t bear to totally part with it just yet.)

Funny how putting a much larger rug in there makes the room feel bigger, not smaller. The room isn’t small, but it was originally set up so that the family room part is supposed to only be that area by the fireplace. This is how it used to look:

Here’s how that area looks now:

You can see how fireplace was transformed here.

And the area that used to be more of just a walkway off to the side:

Is now our entertainment area:

This room functions SO MUCH BETTER this way. Before was cozy for sure, but it was cramped. This layout is much more open, which helps.

I actually love that the furniture all sits on the rug now, I think that’s what helps it to feel bigger:

The rug is wool, so at first it was shedding a ton. Not too bad, but when I vacuumed it would fill the container. But over the last six weeks or so doesn’t do it nearly as bad. It’s worth it to me for the softness of it.

Just for giggles let’s look at the how the room looked early this year:

And now….ahhhhhh, so much calmer:

The rug was WAY cheaper at HomeGoods than I would have paid anywhere else, but still a big purchase for us for sure. I’m glad I waited till I found “the one,” and that the budget allowed for it at the time. How often does that happen? Hardly ever.

I think picking out a rug is one of the hardest decor decisions in a room, do you? In my mind it’s as big as the paint color – it’s just such a large item in the room.