How in the world, Part 2 - The Dining Room

The entire catalyst for the "how in the world" weekend was the dining room.  DH said, out of nowhere, "Let's pull up the carpet!"  Ummm... what???

Let's back up a bit.  You see, I'm a little strange in that I'm not that into hardwood floors.  I'm almost embarrassed to admit it, because I mean, everyone thinks hardwood floors are great, right?  But I just don't.  Call me crazy, but I think that hardwood floors make a room feel cold and less inviting.  Maybe its because I grew up in a house with carpet, so I think carpet is better.

I know that I'm in the minority on this one, but I just do not understand why people think hardwood floors are soooo amazing and then they go and cover up 80+ percent of them with... wait for it... carpet!!! (Ok, rugs, but rugs are carpet!)  So why not just have carpet in the first place and skip the whole "expose a tiny bit of wood on the sides of the carpet" charade?  I just do not see the appeal.

So needless to say, I did not see the point of pulling up our carpet but I know that DH loves hardwood floors so I agreed that we could start with the dining room.

Here is what the dining room looked like before.

Then DH started tearing out the carpet.

Then we had a nasty dirty floor with tack strips, nails and staples sticking out of the floor.

Then we left to go to Home Depot.

But when we got home from Home Depot, DH decided that he really wanted to organize the garage! Woo hoo! Not.  (Garage organization project will be part

"Wait a second.... I thought we were going to work on the dining room... right?"

But DH decided that organizing the garage was a more pressing task.  I wholeheartedly disagreed.  I argued that we really needed to work on the dining room so that we could move the table back in.  He was persistent about the garage.

I worked for an hour or so with him on organizing the garage but the thought of the disaster that was our dining room waiting for us upstairs was literally eating away at me.  I couldn't focus, and I was cranky and angry.  I could only imagine poor little Murph stepping on a tack strip and getting a nail in his paw, or something equally as sad.  So I quit the garage work and went upstairs.

Here's something interesting about me - when I'm pissed I am incredibly productive.  There's nothing like a little anger to get me motivated to complete a task.  I was angry because I felt like I had been tricked.  DH talked me into this project and then he abandoned it.  It and me.  I realize that he views the garage work as being equally important, but our garage was fine - nothing was any different in it than any other day.  Our dining room, on the hand, was non-existent with our table on our porch and all of our glassware in the kitchen, in my way.  I felt like a fool for letting him getting me excited about pulling up the carpet without getting him to commit to finish it the project that same day.  So I worked my ass off, trying to prove that I didn't need him to finish this. 

I worked on my hands and knees, first trying to pull up staples.  Then I did the backbreaking work of removing tack strips, which should have been easy, but for some reason the wood kept splintering so I had to do it piece by piece by piece.  Then I took a putty knife and went along the floor looking for anything that I might have missed or that was raised up and then I pounded it down.  Then I vacuumed at least three times, trying to get up all of the foam, all of the staples, all of the shards of wood.  I worked so hard that I forgot to take pictures of the messy progress, but you get the idea.

And when I was done it looked like this. 

I was so proud of myself.

But I didn't stop there, because remember, I was pissed, and for me pissed = productive, and I was determined to get my dining room back into order.  So I hauled my butt downstairs and lugged up a massive 8x11 area rug that we had purchased over a year ago (we had store credit that we had to use) to plop down on the floor.  Then I brought in as much of the dining room table as I could (our table is glass and I just can't carry it myself.)

And then it looked like this.

 

I'm amazing.

That rug isn't going to stay there - we purchased it for our office and it's way too big for this room, but until we redo the office, it was a great placeholder for the dining room. 

Have I mentioned how proud of myself I was??? I did this ON MY OWN.  When I thought for sure there was no way to finish it without my husband.  And maybe it's my pride kicking in, but I actually don't think that the hardwood floors don't look all that bad.

If you're curious about how the garage turned out, that will be covered in installment 3.  But trust me, the garage transformation is not nearly as impressive as it was for the dining room.  *wink*