spoken for

I have been non-stop since Thursday, I feel like I’m just now relaxing for the first time in days. We spent all weekend and then some working on the house, on the living room.

We were hoping to put the carpet down Saturday but as life would have it, the dryer popped and broke Thursday night. So Steve spent the earlier part of the morning looking at that, driving out for the part, then fixing the silly thing. In retrospect, it was a quick fix as compared to my washer a few weeks ago. But because he didn’t get to that Friday night like he’d wanted, he felt like he wouldn’t be able to do the carpet Saturday and the mid-part of the day was spent fixing a few spots where the paint had come off with the masking tape. Stupid, really, because that tape is not supposed to take the paint off, that’s part of why you use that blue crap. But he apparently didn’t have the patience with it that I did and when I took a short break from taking down tape on Wednesday, he just started pulling it off, way too fast. Oh well, you really can’t tell he “patched” any part anyway, it all blends in wonderfully. Even that spot where E colored with the Sharpie marker is now gone. But he also wasn’t sure about getting the carpet from his parents’ house because it was raining. You don’t want to install wet carpet, of course!

Sarah called and said she was bored to death at home, could she come over? Well sure, of course. (It ended up being a really good thing that she came over because she was able to help us out quite a bit when it came to keeping E out of the way for various things, etc.)

But then suddenly, Steve said he was going to go get the carpet stretcher. Now, I didn’t know anything about laying carpet before we started doing this but apparently if you don’t stretch it or don’t stretch it right you will eventually get bubbles and rolls in the carpet… like what happened to my mom’s living room. They actually had someone do that and after a while, it was apparent it wasn’t done right. (After seeing out finished room, Mom asked if maybe Steve could fix her room for her, we are confident he can.)

We moved the couch and chair into the dining/main room and spent the next 24 hours climbing over the couch and then the chair to get into the kitchen. That was torture, but thankfully it was short lived. I even had to exit the kitchen once by climbing back over the chair then crawling under the kitchen table. :)

Steve went to get the carpet and the kids and I sat on the floor with blankets and watched some tv. When he got back, finally (it took forever), we moved the entertainment center into E’s room (much to the kid’s delight) and Steve started rolling out the carpet padding. It took us all of two seconds to realize that we didn’t have enough padding. We’re not really sure why, either, as we’ve measured the room a thousand times, but the receipt doesn’t show we were shorted, so… who knows? Either way, after laying out what we had and looking to see what time Home Depot opened (7am!!), we all went to sleep.

Early the next morning, Steve left to get more padding and the rest of us headed to church and stuff. By the time I directed and edited and fixed a problem in the editing and got us lunch and visited two stores and got them the promised ice cream and took both of them to Sarah’s house and got home… the carpet was almost completely down. He got the stretcher back 5 minutes till 4 when the store closed, so we only had to pay for one day. ;-)

Man, I tell you what, I am proud of my husband, he has done such a wonderful job on this room! I absolutely love this room! It’s like a whole new place. We’re facing the opposite direction, for one, but we’re also using a part of the house we’ve never actually been able to use before. I remember I was skeptical at first, but removing the wall between the two rooms was a really good idea! I guess we are a little bit stranger than some families in this respect because Steve handles a lot of the decorating ideas. It’s not like he’s Queer Eye or anything, but he has a lot more ideas than I do and I end up just going with the flow. He thinks in terms of how to make this place better for when we sell it while I think more in terms of “just do it, whatever” so we can get it finished and sell it. But wow, if the rest of the house ends up half as wonderful as this room… I may never want to leave. ;-)

So who’s up for some photos? Of course, keep in mind a few things: we don’t have curtains yet. I still have to decide what fabric I want and buy it then my Mommy the master of curtains is going to make me some. She took measurements yesterday. In light of that, we still have the uber ugly ones hanging at the main windows though the kids and I chopped them off Saturday afternoon – they used to touch the floor, but they needed to stay up and be out of the way for laying the carpet. Secondly, I’ve not hung any photos or anything yet on the walls, I think I’m going to put out new stuff instead of the same ones I had in here before we started all this remodeling. There are still some small errors to be fixed like things the carpet stretcher did to the walls (strangely, it’s not a very wall-friendly thing) and Steve is still going to put in some new outlets and stuff – but you won’t really notice this in the photos.

Here’s what the place looked like after we took out most of the furniture, before laying the padding:

You’ll notice the red around the room? I’ve been laughing about that since we bought the place. We pulled up the original carpet to find the wood floors and it looks like someone painted around a rug or something! Funny things the people before us did to this house. (You might be wondering why we didn’t just refinish the flooring. That was the original plan but then we discovered that the smaller room had not one but two different types of wood from the other room including some that was facing the wrong way. This is not to mention all the hard-to-fix cosmetic problems with the wood in both rooms.) But all the white stuff is little splatters of drywall mud and white paint from the ceilings, etc.

Steve putting down padding and then the last section of carpet. You can see that carpet stretcher. It has these very sharp teeth under the black part and you put that into the carpet and the long pole to an opposite wall then stretch out the pole pushing the carpet forward. This ensures it’s all tight enough when it hooks onto the tack strips which are around the room and secure the carpet.

Empty room with the carpet finished. You can see the other end of the stretcher there.

And the nearly finished room that night:

No curtains, of course, just those silly blankets. I can’t wait to fix that. And the silly blanket on the back of the couch there looks so funny, but we all love that blanket. That couch has spent approximately 19 years up against a wall anyway, seriously, so it can stand to have something draped over the back. We’re going to get a slip cover for it soon to last us until we buy a new one. (Next big purchase, I’m told, has to be an oven.) But the couch isn’t really all that bad, so it can wait. Steve reinforced it and fixed a few little issues with it before we brought it back into the room, too. But anyway, you can click through to that photo for more notes if you really even care, lol. Of course, when we get it all completely done, we’ll take better photos.

But I just love this, I’ve never adored a room so much, haha. The trick now is getting E to play in that big empty area. He just keeps trying to confine himself to the table there and the couch. Not to mention that he now feels the need to defy death with acrobatics over the couch!

Okay, but if you’ve paid attention so far… well, I love you. Also, that means you care enough about me that you can offer your opinion. What do you think? I’ve been thinking a nice green or a non-bright red for curtains. Something that’s kinda earthtoney but not drab. I really wanted to paint the room yellow but Steve’s not ready to go all bold colors, so maybe I can play more with the curtains. Mom and I looked at some stuff Monday and I took a few photos, here are two that were not vetoed by Steve:

What’cha think? ;-)