Hit the floor

Bit by bit our house renovations are coming along and let me tell you - it's lookin' good.

We had our wood dining and kitchen floors redone last week and they are beautiful!!

The first step was to remove this closet from the corner of the dining room...

It kind of sucks to not have ANY coat closet upstairs now, but it had to go.  It was ugly, not done well, and it really closed the dining room off.  See what I mean?  Look at how open it is now...

Next, down came the atrocious "window treatments".  I do not like that term.  Just say curtains for Pete's sake...

Then the flooring guys arrived...

One of our dining room walls bows out a bit away from the floor which is understandable for a house built in 1920!  However, this created a bigger gap between that wall and the floor boards in that place than in the rest of the room.  Since we can't just glue little ends of wood to each of the boards to make them long enough to reach the wall, and we can't take the wall down itself and rebuild it, we came up with another idea:  Put a border around the room to fill the space...

The only hang up with this idea was the dining room doorway.  Our living room is on the other side of that torn up entryway (that will eventually be tiled with granite) and basically mirrors the dining room.  To separate the living room from the entryway we had the guys add a turn board in Brazilian cherry.  It was only one board thick, which means the dining room entrance needed to be the same.  However, we were running two boards around the rest of the dining room.  Dilemma!  

We eventually decided to "stair step" the cherry boards to sort of angle them down to one turn board.  The result was perfect!  It looks kind of artistic, like a real craftsman did the work.  Here is the before in the middle of the sanding job...

Here's the whole dining room sanded down...

This is what we had them do in the corners.  I LOVE this herringbone work...!

This is the same corner all stained and finished.  Doesn't that cherry look gorgeous next to the oak...??

Here is another corner that I think came out pretty...

Remember the dining room entryway in its unfinished state?  Here it is finished!  We are SO pleased with how it turned out...!

The finished dining room...

Ok.  On to the kitchen!  A reminder of what it used to look like...

Cabinets, appliances (like the Fabulous 400), subfloor and CARPET removed!  Todd was ecstatic to discover we have birdseye maple floors in the kitchen.  Apparently, you never see this as flooring because birdseye maple is expensive.  And we just had it lying there all blanketed and cozy under some nasty grey carpet...!

Todd removing the plaster off the old chimney.  We're going to leave the brick exposed...

And the big unveil!  It really was an unveiling to us too.  Todd and I left for Missouri right before the guys stained the kitchen.  We had picked up some sample stain packets to figure out what we liked, but it turns out we didn't like any by themselves.  We decided we liked the lighter color we had chosen, but wanted a hint of red in it to warm it up a little.  Those were the last things we said to the flooring guy before we left.  He said he'd mix the stains and...we'd see it when we got home!

WE. LOVE. IT.

The entrance to the kitchen from the dining room.  We matched the wood pattern here to the other dining room entryway...

The full kitchen.  The floor in the breakfast nook in the back will be removed and most likely will have brick layed...

Check out the grain on this floor!  Todd about peed himself over the board that is four from the right...

How silky does this look?  It's like standing in little pools of melted gold...

So, we may have floors, but we don't have a kitchen yet.  We've been grilling out each night until we can get a stove - which will be very soon!

Stay tuned for what will eventually replace the Fab 400!