We certainly spent our labor day weekend laboring!

This house has wall to wall olderish carpet that has a strong dog/cat odor so we have intentions of replacing all of the flooring within the next few weeks. On a whim, Jake pulled up a corner in one of the bedrooms, and lo and behold: originial hardwood flooring! He checked the 2nd bedroom; 2 for 2! He checked the master bedroom: just disappointment. You'd think they would have put it in that room for sure, but nonetheless, we have 2 less rooms to put new flooring in (the living area also came back negative and I'll be posting soon about the situation in the family room). So Jake tore up the carpet in those two rooms and we spent a few hours pulling up nail strips and staples.


The floor in this room is in really nice shape and will not need to be refinished any time soon. We will need to add quarter round to the baseboards.



The floor in the smaller room is in a little rougher shape. It's so much better than the carpet that was there, but we'll do a sand and refinish on it maybe next spring.

And speaking of new flooring in the rest of the house (other than the master bedroom which we'll try to match with these other two bedrooms), we're thinking of bamboo with a cherry finish. Any thoughts? I have an aunt who doesn't like the dark uniformity of her floor; so maybe consider throwing in a few ligther pieces here and there for variety?

My parents came for the weekend so our work didn't stop with flooring. Jake organized the garage and both cars fit now. I painted ceilings in the kitchen, upstairs bath, hallway, and one bedroom. Jake had seen a segment on HGTV about using newspaper to take down wallpaper. We gave it a whirl and it worked like a charm in one room, but not so much so in this one. This room (the master) had more of a textured wallpaper so it didn't work quite as well. You basically spray the wallpaper with water (we did not score either room but it probably wouldn't have hurt), slap on a piece of dry newspaper, spray that wet until it's saturated and sticks to the wall. Continue on in segments and keep the newspaper wet as you go (good idea to have your floor protected with plastic or some such). I think we waited about 30 mins and then started peeling off where we started and it came off in nice strips. In the room where the paper and backing came off smoothly, we (my saintly mother) had to scrub off the glue residue. In the room where the paper came off but we (my most amazing husband) had to scrape off the backing, there was no glue to scrub off. So between the two experiments we came close to what could be a fairly easy job.