We’ve been spending every ounce of spare time over at our new house. Sadly, the wood floors are unsalvagable, but we’ve decided to cover them with enviornmentally friendly, totally renewable, bamboo. We got a slammin deal thanks to ifloors an online flooring company that thankfully has a showroom in Seattle. In the mean time I’m trying to get some painting done before I have to worry about drop cloths. Here I am painting in between the creases of what was once wood paneling (while listening to “Whadya’ Know?” on NPR):

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I decided to paint our bedroom blue because it receives more natural light than any other room. I was going for a sky blue, and I wasn’t disappointed. Consumer Reports just did a whole thing on interior paints, and reccommended major store brands as best buys (like Hope Depot and Walmart). We went to Lowe’s and I picked out the brightest light blue I could find. It always amazes me how much darker the wall ends up compared to the color sample.

Don’t go thinking this whole weekend was spent cheerfully painting walls, we actually had to tackle some pretty big flooring problems. In order to get the floor ready for the installer, Josh had to figure out why the floor had a huge hump down the center of the dining room. After ripping up a bunch of floor boards, we discovered another wood floor underneath it with old, misaligned, planks that had warped with age. Obviously we couldn’t rip them out, (through the cracks we could see underneath the house), so Josh carefully stapled wedges of wood down and then nailed plywood over it. I can’t believe it only took a sentence to describe this process because it took much, much longer then anticipated. To remove all the boards Josh ended up having to pull out the molding, but did everything in his power to avoid this. I haven’t seen Josh that pissed in a long time, I guess house projects do that to people (ahem, DAD). Here is a picture of the finished project:
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I’d like everyone to take note of the chandelier in the background. It is fantastically tacky with fake ‘jewels’ dripping from fake candles, intricately detailed and decorated with gold accents, I love it…Josh hates it. It came with the house, obviously really old and vintage. I keep saying we just need to tie it up so that Josh won’t hit his head on the spiky part at the base of the chandelier. Josh isn’t buying it. I told him replacing the chandelier is LOWEST priority right now…hopefully it’ll be no priority and it stays.