Front Living Room Makeover – The Floors

You guys! Ok, among the crazy busy christmas season at the store & life, Jose and I are trying to make some progress on the farmhouse. When I last did a house update a few weeks ago I said we were about to demo the kitchen [here], well there was a slight change of plans. When we demo the kitchen, that means we will also be demoing the sunroom [here] since it is a “part of the kitchen” technically & that means we will be losing the main living room space we are using at the moment & that sounds down right stressful. SO, the change is that we are going to make our front living room livable [meaning we are getting the floors fixed so we can walk on them] so that we will have a living room to hang out in while the sunroom and kitchen are being remodeled. That might raise the question of why we don’t use our back living room? Though it has a fireplace it is quite cold this time of year & well, frankly that room will be remodeled soon as well. Jose is trying to get me on this whole “one room at a time thing” or the whole “finish a room before you start another” what is that even? I agree with him though I am ready for this room to be done. Here is a little peak at what that looked like before sanding…

Please excuse the terrible photos in this post, but I don’t think anything I could do could make it look better. The floor s required a lot of sanding and scraping to get them decent looking & ready for painting…

& now let’s take it way back to when we moved in…

& after a lot of sanding and hard work…

Ok, it may not look like much, but trust me.. it’s so much smoother & most importantly ready for paint! It kind of feels like when you do major renovations you take 10 steps back to take one step forward. A little over half of the room has the original flooring from the 1800’s that was covered by subfloor and carpet. When the subfloor and carpet were ripped up we were left with lots of glue on the flooring & we discovered that the last 1/3rd of the room near the fireplace did not have original flooring, but only subfloor. That is when we decided that we were going to paint the flooring to make it all cohesive. BUT we were going to replace the subfloor near the fireplace with boards until we read something that Natalie from Hammade furniture wrote the other day. She wrote about how she hand scraped her subfloor to look like boards before she painted them. Ummm hello! So we thought we would give it a try & Jose hand scarped the subfloor in the living room to resemble boards & so far so good! We are anxious to see what it looks like when we put paint on it, but it will save us a ton of money if it works!

 

So now we need to decide on paint colors. The worst. Here are three colors we kind of played around with, but we weren’t in love. We thought we were wanting a greige or gray taupe, but after sampling them on the floor we are thinking lighter & less gray. Another lesson in “Always sample in the room you will be painting!” This room get’s very little light at the moment with only two small windows in the front, one lead glass window by the stairs, & a front door that let’s little light in [new door coming soon] so I want to keep this room light & bright. I’m thinking a warm creamy white on the floor, but I will be back with what we decide. I actually have butterflies about this because I have ALWAYS wanted a painted wood floor. It’s in my cottage & farmhouse dreams I never thought would come true. So, what do you guys think of our progress. I’m hoping to have the floors painted by the end of the week so stay tuned for updates! Oh, & cross your fingers the whole hand scraped plywood thing works out. I’m a little nervous! Thank you SO MUCH for stopping by the blog today & be sure to follow me over on Instagram & Facebook for behind the scenes. xx

 

See the shiplap progress we have made in this room…

Click [here] to see the shiplap work we did on the walls.