Ahhhhhh, the snowball effect…I know I’m not the only one to experience it, especially when it comes to DIY and home improvement. You know what I’m talking about…you paint a bedroom room and realize “Hey! I should paint the hallway too”. One thing leads to another and the next thing you know you’ve ripped out your old flooring for something new. No? Is this just me?
Well it happened to me with our master bathroom remodel (if you haven’t been following along, here’s the finished product). The clean new look of the penny tile really brought out the “EW” of our 9 year old carpet. AND we currently don’t have a bathroom door, which we desperately need. I mean, you gotta have your privacy when you’re pooping, am I right!!! So we need a door, but before I make a door (its gonna be a barn door) we have to rip out the carpet and install new flooring. I want to make sure that the door isn’t too far off of the floor so that I can use the floor track system that came with the barn door hardware.
I’ve hated our carpet since the day we moved into our house those 9 years ago. Since day one, I’ve been planning on ripping it out and replacing it with something else. I didn’t know what I wanted to replace it with until a year ago – luxury vinyl plank flooring. I have several clients and friends who have this flooring and swear by it. I started doing research and it took me 9 months to decide on a brand (yep you read that right…9 effing months!!!). I decided to go with Home Depot’s Lifeproof flooring. Its a mid range flooring and was right within our budget. It does get mixed reviews, but I have a friend who has it in her house (and she has 2 big dogs) and she loves it. So I decided to give it a shot….but now I had to decide on a color. Ugh! One of the decisions in life that always makes my head spin. Like lots of other things, I can decide on color for clients in a blink of an eye, but when it comes to picking out color choices for myself – nope! It takes a lifetime for me to decide a color for myself. So it took me 2 months to pick out a color. I know. I’m ridiculous! 10 samples and 50 decisions later, I decided on Walton Oak.
No regrets either! I absolutely love it! The color is cool and warm all at the same time (if you know Rustoleum’s Briarsmoke stain color, then you know exactly what I’m talking about!). It has varying widths too – small, medium, and large. It makes for a fun, visual pattern.
So out came the carpet as soon as the bathroom was done. Our plan was to do it room by room – this time of year is usually very busy for me with orders and Christmas present making, I didn’t want to get overwhelmed. Well, the Bearded Fellow loves…and I mean…LOVES everything to do with demo. We make a plan to keep a project small and as we go, his plans get bigger and bigger. Our bedroom turned into the hallway, which in turn turned into another bedroom. Stress! So my office looks like the chaos monster lost his favorite sweater; our dining and living room are not only cheerfully decorated for Christmas, but the chaos monster ran through those rooms looking for his sweater too. Needless to say, my “OCD things can’t be completely chaotic” devil on my shoulder is whispering in my ear “CLEAN! CLEAN! CLEAN! TOO MUCH CHAOS!”
With that said, we’ve been working our asses off for the last week laying flooring in our upstairs (oh yeah, did I mention we ripped carpet off of our stairs too…oh! and we ripped the wainscoting off the hallway walls too…absolute chaos, I tell you!). We (I mean ME) decided to rip out all of the door trim molding too – I love the craftsman style and when I trimmed out our bathroom door and window in that, I decided it had to be in the rest of the house. You never realize just how many doors you have in an area of your house until you decide to do trim work. “Our” next decision was “if we’re going to replace the door molding, we might as well replace the baseboards too”….yep…its a BIG ASS SNOWBALL right now guys.
But I know, all of these late nights and stressful days are going to be worth it in the end. Our upstairs is going to look beautiful…and you know what that will mean right? The snowball will roll right down those stairs and into the main level of our house (we live in a tri-level). I should say that we’re planning to replace the flooring on that level to to the LVP so that everything matches and is consistent. We’ll have to wait on that one though! We can’t lay that flooring until we demo our 1980s kitchen and I build all the cabinets…so I’m just gonna let future Amanda worry about all that mess!
Here are a few before pics…I’m the absolute worst at taking pics before I start a project, but these will give you a general idea of the carpet we had.
What do you guys think? Is it a night and day transformation? (Just ignore the missing wainscoting in the hallway…future Amanda is gonna worry about that too.)
Don’t forget to follow along on this crazy DIY and woodworking journey on the social medias.
Take it easy guys!
