For my birthday I asked for Adirondack chairs for the fire pit Derek and I made in the backyard a few weeks earlier.  Well, we got all four chairs I asked for and then they just sat waiting to be assembled for a few months.     : shame :  We kinda let the completion of the fire pit project just hang in limbo because the chairs came unfinished and disassembled, and I kinda promised Derek I would take care of staining, sealing, and putting them together. Oops!  With it getting dark way too early, and us not having a garage or carport it was sometimes hard to find time or a location to stain, seal, and assemble the chairs.  Well one day a few weeks ago my WONDERFUL superhero of a husband knocked all 4 chairs out in one chill and leaf ridden afternoon.

Check out the finished product.  Not to shabby…ehhh?!?

Sorry I don’t have a picture close up.  I’ll work on that.

Since we were having our hardwood floors refinished and purchased a new couch we decided it was a good time to say goodbye to our old 1/2 eaten couch and chair.   We decided to keep the love seat and move it upstairs to the office, but not before we swapped out the ripped cushions for the few remaining decent ones on the couch.  The couch, armchair, and ottoman got moved out to the curb for trash pickup.  Since these were so ratty and 1/2 eaten we figured not even the Goodwill would take these bad boys off our hands, so we then had the idea to try and re-purpose as many of the materials from the couch and armchair as possible.

Derek and our friend Jonathan love using the fire pit in the backyard and are always looking for a fresh source of wood to burn.  So the wood frame was intended to meet that demise, and I was planning on using the stuffing from the torn cushions to make throw pillow inserts for the new couch.  Well, it began to rain the day of, and the guys scrapped the idea of chopping up the frame of the couch for firewood.  I mean on a Saturday afternoon when they could be inside playing xbox and having a beer; who in their right mind would pick standing out in 40 degree weather, in the rain, and try to chop  a couch in half?  Well at least I got to steal some stuffing before the boys hauled our beloved, used, and abused couch and chair to the curb.  Goodbye Mr. Couch.  You were a good couch and you will be missed.  Thanks for all the years of giving us a place to sit, and for Derek and Cohen to nap.

Since we are still waiting for our NEW purdy couch to arrive we wanted something to sit on while we wait.  We decided to venture out the Pottery Barn Outlet to look for arm chairs.  Well as luck would have it they had nothing that we wanted in the seating department, but as we usually do we wandered over to the rug section to peruse the goods.  Look what we found!  We found this 5×8 wool rug for only $99.00.  SCORE!  I think this rug retails around $180-$200.

P.S. – We found out that our new couch won’t be in until around February 15th.  Ahhhhhhhh!

I’ve been MIA for the past week or so due to the wonderful event of having our wood floors refinished in our 60+ year old home.  We hired a company called Long’s Pro-Hardwood to take over our house for a week and make our floors all purdy like.  Let me remind you that the floor in this house have seen better days…I mean a lot better.  The wood floors in this house not only have had mucho traffic pass over them in the past 60 years, but for about 20 of those years they were covered by carpet.  Carpet can suck every ounce of moisture out of floors and wear down the finish to nothing.  Basically, we were left with floors that look like this…

Pretty bad, I know!  To add to the shabby and far from chic floors; we also had to deal with two lovely plywood filled holes in the floors.

As you may know, when you get wood floors refinished you have to find some other place to store EVERYTHING!  So we looked into renting one of those “we’ll bring it to your home and leave it in your driveway” storage units, and finding that there wouldn’t be one available for us to rent until February.  FEBRUARY!?!  That’s like two months away and we had the crew coming in like four days to start sanding the floors.  That meant we were moving all of the furniture, rugs, and newly put up Christmas decor into the remaining 2.5 rooms of the house.  I say 2.5 because we could only use half of the kitchen.  The workers needed to use some of the outlets in there or something.

Having all of our stuff still in the house while saw dust would be flying about we decided to cover all we could in plastic. Seriously, it was as if Dexter were going to be our house guest.

So on Monday we handed over the keys to our sweet little home, and headed across town to shack up with my folks for the week.  Believe it or not, they even let us bring the two furry misfits with us.  During the day, Cohen and Wrigley were confined to the garage, and once we were home for the evening they chilled inside with us.  My parents were even kind enough to let our sweet babies sleep in the room with us.  Yes, we even brought the dog beds with us.  Three dog bed to be exact.  One for the garage during the day, and two for the bedroom at night.  So spoiled are they.

On Saturday, while I was at work, my dear hubby went through the house and wiped down all the walls, vacuumed all the floor boards, and cleaned all the blinds.  This saved me a lot of pain considering my sinuses would have made me miserable for the next 2-3 days if I had been involved in the dust clean up.  In all, it was a great experience.  We got to hang with the rents for a week, save money on not having to board the dogs, and get our ratty old floors gussied up.

I had high hopes for really dark brown floors, but Derek pointed out the fact that dog fur would show up extra easy on espresso stained floors; so we went a bit lighter.  The lighter color keeps with the era of the house anyway.  We are thrilled with the results.  Here’s the finished product.

This is one of the two areas where they added new wood to replace the giant plywood holes.  Pretty decent job considering they were dealing with new wood vs. wood with 60 years of dirt, grime, and lord knows what else mashed into it.  Heck, I’m just happy not to have plywood in my living room.

This is the second area they replaced plywood with new flooring.

We purchased new floor vents for the living and dining rooms.  I love these new vents.  They add just the right “Craftsman” touch to the house.

Don’t you just love the beat up floor boards? Me neither. Guess that’s what a sander will do to them.  Next project…repainting of the floor boards.

One day I may even post a few pics with furniture.  That’s if the couch we ordered ever comes in.

Not quite as dark as I would have liked, but I think this color matches the age of our house.  We’ll go with darker wood on the next house.

I’m quite excited.  After owning the house for 3 years and dealing with the worn and faded 60+ year old wood floors in our house, we are finally ready to get these bad boys refinished.  And I couldn’t be happier.  The original owners of our home had beautiful wood floors throughout the entire house and in the mid 70′s did well, a 70′s style makeover and carpeted the entire thing.  Do you people know what putting carpet over wood flooring does after 20 years?  It dries the floors out and wears off any prayer of having any kind of finish left when you pull up the carpet.  That is exactly what happened to ours.

Yesterday Derek met with a man to get an estimate on refinishing our floors and replacing the plywood that now is nailed into the holes where the two floor furnaces used to sit.  FINALLY!  I am so thankful for someone being able to do this for us.  Wrigley and her nutso-ness didn’t allow for us to keep a carpet over one of the two plywood covered holes.  She made certain everyday that the rug would be NOT over the hole by the end of the day.

The guy mentioned to Derek that most wood floors can only be refinished about six times in their lifetime.  They way ours looked and judging by the age of our house I was certain that we had to be on refinish #4…at least!  Well, that is SO NOT the case.  This will be the first time, count it…1st time, these poor little splintery things will have the life breathed back into them.  My poor little neglected floors.  I forgot the best part.  We are getting 3 rooms, 1 hallway, and 2 rebuilds for only $1700.00.  Yipee!!!

Derek and I love, love, love dark wood so true to form the first stain that came to mind was a deep chocolaty color for the floors.  I would love to have espresso stained floors.  Kind of like this…

Or this…

And as luck would have it, I just put up the Christmas decorations & tree that now all have to be taken right back down.  THAT’S GONNA BE FUN!

We’ll be spending the remainder of the weekend covering every square inch of the house in plastic tarps.  Taping plastic here, shoving towels in crack there…JOY!  See we just ordered a new couch.  My dream came true!  Oh, wait, that’s right!  I haven’t told ya’ll yet.  WE BOUGHT A NEW COUCH.  This couch is absurdly comfy.  It’s the PB Comfort from Pottery Barn.  We are normally PB Outlet nerds, but this time we made a purchase from a regular PB store.  Yes, we think we are super fancy now.

If we weren’t two of the biggest couch potatoes already this will assure that we never get up and exercise AGAIN.  I’m cool with that…exercise is overrated anyhow.

Since Pottery Barn does a white glove delivery of their furniture we would like to have the floors refinished so that we don’t have to move the brand spanking new couch and squeeze it into another already over crowded room of the house and risk damaging this brand new couch.  I know I would like at least one possibly even two weeks with a couch that doesn’t look something like this…

New Couch…meet our Old Couch

I have to admit I was a tad nervous about how the dark floors would look with our lawn green walls, but after seeing this room from Canadian House & Home; I think it’s going to be spectacular.

The only way we can go is up.