No Living Room Floor? No Problem!

I also thought about titling this post, "Honey, You Took Out Our Living Room Floor," but that seemed a little long...and cliche.

I suppose I should have started with a groveling apology for being away from the blog for SO long. So, hat in hand, we do apologize. Life has been wild and interesting, to say the least!

To explain, about the time of our blog post before this one, we found out we would be adding to our family, and exactly 10 months ago from today, our sweet baby boy arrived. He is a complete joy but the pregnancy was really uncomfortable for me.

That said, it delayed a lot of work on my part but we are back on track! The kitchen is pretty much done....photos will come in another post....but the big news this week is the living room.

We've known for quite some time that this room needed a major overhaul and I finally put my foot down and pushed for it. So yesterday, the old floor came out. The hubby and a nice guy he hired to help starting rebuilding today. Here are a few more of the progress today:

Some of the ends of the joists towards the front of the house were rotten, as we expected. And as the photos show, the room now has a new floor structure, adjusted to accommodate the new 3/4" subfloor and 3/4" hardwood flooring. What we took up was approximately 1" thick tongue in groove hardwood. No subfloor below, just dirt.

I'm happy as a clam because this is progress, my friends! And the chipping, lead-based paint around the perimeter of the room is gone! See all of that 'gold' paint still on the stairs and trim? All lead-based. Nothing to mess with. We've painted over pretty much all of the rest of the exposed lead-based paint, and especially with the little guy crawling, I feel much better getting rid of more. Soon, it will all be covered over with at least two coats of paint, after a good wipedown with TSP to remove the grime.

The trim, baseboards and stairs will be white. The doors will be black. And the wall color will be one of the following:

I will be putting test spots up on the walls tomorrow when the subfloor is down. Hopefully it will be an easy decision. I've done this before with 5 or 6 different colors and I still couldn't decide.

More soon. I promise.

~Ann