When I last left you in March, my house was in complete disarray after opening the wall between be kitchen and my dining room.
Even when the wall project was complete, our renovation was not. We decided to go for it and rip up all of the carpet in our house to refinish the hardwood flooring underneath. We had hardwoods underneath all of the carpet on the upper two levels of our house, except for in our coat closet. In two weeks, Brian and I tore up all of the carpet, tack strips and staples before we had a company come in to do the rest of the work for us.
It was a lot of work, but we saved about $1,000 doing it ourselves. The payoff was pretty immediate.
Look at those hardwoods!
We got pretty lucky. For being covered up for who knows how many years the floors were in pretty good shape. We had some major scratching in our office that sanded out, much to our surprise.
We effectively moved out of our house for a week while the floor guys came in to do their handy work.
First they sanded down a few spots to do a stain test. Our goal was to match our laminate flooring as close as possible.
We ended up choosing the stain on the right corner of the step.
It is Minwax’s Provincial, and it was a tough choice! We really liked the darkest color but I didn’t want to pick a color that would immediately make all dirt specs visible. Especially with a light-haired dog — it seemed like a big mistake.
Here’s our bedroom before:
After they sanded it down:
And from a different angle, with Minwax Provincial stain:
OH MY GOSH SO PRETTY. Here’s the stairs after being stained:
And here they are stained:
The stain color we chose matched really nicely with the laminate flooring we’d laid in our basement a few years ago. It was a great pick!
Here’s our living room floors before:
You can see here a lot of dark staining on the floors. The flooring guys actually tore out those boards to fix the problem! How cool does this look?
And you’d never know they had to remove anything:
We are really happy with how the floors came out. I’ll share photos of the entire renovation soon. Stay tuned!
A Smith of All Trades 