Mother of all projects...for now at least...

I'm sure I'm not alone in being overwhelmed with gratitude that the elections are finally over. I know what an amazing privilege it is to exercise my right to vote - I cast my vote for elected officials at the state and national level as well as propositions locally. What a great country we live in. But my television, phone, email and internet were inundated with negative political ads and I'm happy to have it all behind me. Moving on...

We are in the thick of our latest and greatest project...flooring. To date (including our previous home) this has been the most disruptive project. Yes we've replaced flooring before, but it was nothing like this.

Have I ever mentioned that we have mauve carpet. No joke - throughout the whole house we have mauve carpet. Not only is the color atrocious, it is original to the home, over 25 years old. For the age of the carpet, it really is in fantastic condition if you can look past the color. In fact, the color of the carpet was almost a deal breaker for my husband when we first walked through the house, he hated it so much. It didn't take much manipulation to get Steve behind me on replacing some of it.

We decided to replace the carpet with hardwood. At first it was in the entryway, dining room and living room. But of course that expanded to the formal living room and both hallways. Then we knocked out the office wall and decided that needed wood floors as well...and even the stairs. Before long we had ripped out all the carpet in these areas.

What you find under 25 year old carpet will make your skin crawl. I was not prepared for the amount of dirt alone that we uncovered. It made me think of all the rooms that still have that carpet in our house - I will be working much faster to get it replaced! Man, I will be grateful for wood floors! We have a concrete subfloor which has to be ground with a hand grinder so that the glue adheres better. I thought this part of the process would go much faster, but alas, we are on day 5 (But really only two working days) living in complete chaos. The kitchen is taped off which means we have to walk outside and around to get to our kitchen. We have a little toddler who is constantly black from playing on the concrete floors. We have instigated a mandatory shoe policy which should eliminate a tetanus shot in our future.

We started with this: Which turned to this: (yes, we're removing the rest of the mauve carpet, but we have to move the piano before we can take it out.

And from this:

We're hoping to wrap up the grinding on Saturday (aka remove the plastic and enter the kitchen without walking outside.) Hopefully Monday we'll see some wood floors being installed. Goodbye mauve.