Extreme Home Makeover....

...No, not the show! (Although I have participated on one of these houses and it was AMAZING!) We decided to undertake a home renovation project this weekend in all anticipation that it would be finished (or nearly finished) by the time Tuesday rolled around. We decided we were TIRED of the carpet in our house. When we moved into our house back in October (in a hurry none the less) we didn't really have time to think much less time to do any improvements before the house became ours. Since I am in law school and the husband travels for work a lot, we didn't have too much free time to get things started to improve our new house. So, we have been wanting to get rid of the carpet for a while now, we weren't sure how old it was since we weren't the ones who had it installed and we also have two dogs, carpet just wasn't fitting into our lifestyle. We decided we wanted to get hardwoods a while back. We also decided that we wanted to go a head and do the whole house. We then decided we wanted to do it ourselves (because my husband is handy like that and we actually enjoy improvement projects). First, we had no idea what kind of floors we wanted. We didn't know what color, what kind of wood, how wide we wanted the boards, we knew nothing. We started looking around every chance we got to get a feel for what we liked and also get some pricing. We knew we wanted to do it this summer while things were pretty slow and we had some time.

Natural hickory...Sneak peek after Day 1.

       Since I was off for Memorial Day, we knew it would be a long weekend for us and the perfect opportunity to do the floors. We bought the floors a few weeks ago and bright and early Saturday morning, the renovation commenced.We tore out the carpet in no time flat. We then decided we wanted to extend a wall so we would have a place to hang our tv (since the wall had been altered by the previous owner). We built the wall. Then, we decided that we wanted to paint the room while the carpets were out so we could lighten the room. We got about 25 different paint swatches and taped them to the wall. We each struck the ones we hated and it came down to about three. We picked one and then it was done. The room looks COMPLETELY different already. ( I am saving pictures for when we get it all done.) Now, once the wall was built and the room was painted. The laying of the floors began. This.Process.Was. EXCRUCIATING! It was SO hard! I mean ridiculous! And when I left to come back to work this morning, only about half of the FIRST ROOM was done. We had anticipated it would go quick and we would at least have the living room, dining room and the hallway done by the time I had to return to work then Emory could work on one room a day until Friday when I could help again. My body is screaming with muscle aches of muscles I didn't even know I had! I feel sorry for my poor husband who is now at home laying floors all by himself. But, on the bright side, we will  have a whole new house when we are finished, but it is definitely ALOT more work than we had anticipated!