As my small readership knows, we are currently doing some major renovating at our house! I’m hoping to have some new readers stopping by since I am participating in the One Room Challenge, so I am going to give you a summary of our project. But there’s new information for everyone!! We also participated in the One Room Challenge when we transformed our “office” to a mudroom in the spring of 2016. I really underestimated the time that project would take, so we did not finish in 6 weeks. But the end result was SO worth the wait. This time, our self-imposed deadline is stricter because I go back to work from my maternity leave in early November.

This time we are actually working on most of our first floor. The main point of the project is new flooring, but we will also be tackling our double sided fireplace at the same time. This project actually affects 5 spaces: foyer, dining room, powder room, great room, and sunroom. While I wouldn’t say that we will end up with any room finished (in the sense that I’ll never want to do anything more to it) by the end of the 6 weeks, I imagine they will be DRASTICALLY better than “before.”

We have a couple reasons for working on this project. The flooring in our builder-grade home is not high quality. We were happy with our builder EXCEPT when it came to the flooring. In fact, they changed their flooring subcontractor right after we were done building because I assume they were having issues. The carpet wore down very quickly (we built not quite 7 years ago). The tile was also laid poorly (see below). In addition, we didn’t really love the tile anyway AND we had an old dog that didn’t treat the carpet very well in his last year or so of life.

Let’s start with some “before” pictures. I’ll start with the sunroom since the last time I put the sunroom on here, my pictures were embarrassingly bad. I was trying to stick to a schedule, and I should have just waited until I could get better pictures during better sunlight hours. Anyway, I really like this room and will like it even better with the improvements we have planned! This room was our playroom at one time. It looked pretty much like the pictures I am about to show you, except there was an ikea kallax behind the couch and toys all over the room. We got to a point where we had too many toys for that room, so we moved almost everything to the basement.

Here are the rest of the spaces. Remember that these pictures aren’t really indicative of our style. We built the house with plans to upgrade through the years.  We spent our money on structural features and saved money on finishes that we could upgrade more easily on our own.  A lot of plans for these rooms have been put off until this flooring project is complete. We’ve planned and saved and are finally able to tackle the project that affects the entire house. We’ve lived here 6.5 years. We’ve completed the mudroom and deck,  and this project will allow us to move forward on decorating things the way we want them!

We are super excited to upgrade this beige beauty. By the end of the challenge, the fireplace should be done and all of the carpet and tile on our first floor will be gone and replaced with hardwoods and new tile. The wood is going in the foyer, dining room, great room, and sunroom. The tile in the bathroom is being replaced with new and better tile. The only spaces on the first floor we are not working on is the kitchen (because we don’t want hardwoods in the kitchen and we will probably do a full kitchen reno at some point), the laundry room (its currently vinyl flooring and is not a super important room for us), and the mudroom (because it’s already done).

So here is the plan for the space

I LOVE the tile for the bathroom. It ties in so nicely with our slate tile in the mudroom, and the texture is really cool. It’s kind of rougher and not shiny. We were originally wanting a medium scale tile. I was planning patterns based on a 4-6 in tile. These are 2 inch tiles, which actually work out much better for creating a pattern.

FINALLY, let me show you where we are in the process. We’ve already torn out all of the carpet and all of the tile except the bathroom (I guess because Parker still want to use that bathroom?). In addition, we treated the subfloor to go the extra mile in preventing any pet smells from sticking around.

We should have some interesting updates for next week. We will be spending most of our time this week on the fireplace. We want to get all of the messy work done before we start laying floors. There are also some issues we’ve run into with the floors we ordered. I don’t want elaborate too much right now because I don’t know how it’s going to end up. But if nothing else, it will make for story :/ Stay tuned.

Jalene