It’s amazing what you can do with a little bit of paint and some new flooring! When we first looked at purchasing our home, it was the large open space that got us! (Definitely not the once-white carpet!)
We thought oh man, how amazing would this space look with hardwood floors in it?! After we decided to make this house our home, I started dreaming of new hardwood floors, but didn’t actually think it would be something that we would be able to afford anytime soon.
Then, one day, we were just randomly shopping at Home Depot, and happened upon this beautiful hardwood flooring on sale for super cheap! I was about 98% sure that it matched the color of the hardwood already present in our dining room. We quickly snatched up a sample and ran home to check… and it did! Yipee! We were one step closer to getting our hardwood floors!
Although we could afford the flooring, we were not 100% sure that we could afford to pay for someone to install it, or that we wanted to pay someone to install it.
This lead to a quick phone call to my parents, to see if maybe they would help us, since they had previously installed hardwood flooring (that they made themselves from trees on the farm!). They said yes, and that they had all of the equipment that we needed and would bring it!
My parents live about 5.5 hours away and are always super busy with their farming, so I had a little bit of time to do the prep work before they got here.
The very first steps that I took were to remove the baseboard, and then start ripping up the carpet. When I removed the baseboard, I was very careful to label the baseboard itself and the wall where it came from, so I would know where to put it back.
Once I had ripped all of the carpet out, I thought, oh man… if we ever want to paint these walls, now’s definitely the time to do it! So I called up my husband at work, and said hey… I kind of want to paint too! Not really having that much of a choice, he said ok fine, and that night we went to pick out our paint colors. The next morning I started painting!
As you can see, we actually decided to paint the living room two colors to give it a little more dimension. (Please ignore the mess!)
After all of my carpet was ripped up, and my walls were painted, my parents headed up, and it was time to start installing the floors!
Row by row, we got it done. 564 square feet of hardwood flooring banged out in two days!
Here are the after pictures… What do you think? Would you choose before or after?!
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I love the openness of the shiny wood floors! When we bought our 1950’s home over 35 years ago we covered the oak floors up with W/W carpeting for better winter warmth and to cut down noise. Seeing this might convince me to remove that old carpeting and refinish those floors.
Oh yes! You definitely have to expose those beautiful hardwoods!! 😉 At least your carpet will have helped to protect the flooring for the last 35 years!! My girls are really, really hard on my floors, but they have been pretty durable so far!
Love your remodel. What color did you use on the walls? I really am interested in it.
I love your floors. Beautiful. I want to take up carpet in my bedrooms and put down flooring. Our budget isn’t for professional to do it and am not sure that we can as we are older couple(85-83) it would be concrete under the carpet. How hard is this to do?
I LOVE your floors! GREAT job! Definitely I’d pick the “after” the almost white carpet ?
Also I’m in love with your paint color choices, please do tell what colors you used. I’m in love.
Thank you for sharing your project with me!
Sandy
Can you tell me the name of the two different colors of blue that you painted the room? I will be painting my living room very soon and I fell in love with the two colors you used. You’ve also inspired me to remove the wall to wall carpet and to have it replaced with wood. Can’t wait to see my living room transformed like yours! Love love love your after pictures!
Your remodel is beautiful. You did a fantastic job on the flooring, something I can’t tackle anymore due to knee problems. I have only one suggestion and that is to add at least one more sheer panel to each window. It would just add a softer and richer effect.