New House Renovation Progress

Happy Wednesday, friends! Thanks for all your kind words about our new home last week! In case you missed it, catch up here with the empty house "before" tour and real estate photos (there are some gems in there...). We have been hard at work over the past several weeks getting the place into shape so we can move in THIS weekend. Yep, this weekend! It's crunch time. We'll see how much we can finish between now and then - I can't wait to see it all come together. SO much work has been done (I've been calling it our month-long renovation blitz), but there is still plenty to do and we've already got plans for future projects.

Let's walk through some progress photos today, shall we? Also, please forgive the crazy lighting and slight graininess of some of these photos - construction work doesn't always wait for perfect light and camera setups so I had to snap some quick shots with my iPhone along the way!

If you follow me on Instagram (@mayricherfullerbe), you already saw a sneak peek of the very first project we did when my father-in-law (FIL) arrived: rip out the two closets in the dining room (below).

Goodbye, closets! The reasons we removed them were two-fold: one, they made the dining room feel really small, and two, they had to go to make way for our plans to open up the dining room to the kitchen. We have plenty of storage elsewhere in the house, so we weren't worried about losing that space.

Soon after that we turned our attention to the second floor. Room by room, we ripped out nasty carpet, prepped the floors (oh how I dislike you, carpet tacks, staples and old flooring nails) and started laying the new, beautiful hardwood floors. The next few photos are from the installation in our master bedroom.

In case any of you are in the market for new flooring, we went with 2.25-in wide prefinished oak hardwood from Lowe's (Bruce Addison Oak Hardwood in Spice to be exact). I'll probably dedicate a separate post to our hardwood floors, but so far we are happy with them. They're perfect for the more traditional style of our home, and many of the other homes in our neighborhood have similar hardwood floors, so trading the carpet for them is one way we're bringing this house back up to snuff :). And yes, we did install them ourselves with the help of my FIL. Installing 1000 square feet of hardwood is not for the faint of heart!

In the photos above, we had also primed and painted the walls (Behr Premium Plus color matched to Benjamin Moore Winter White). Shall we compare this to the before of this bedroom for a sec?

So fresh and so clean!

One fun surprise we found when we pulled the carpet in the hallway and other bedrooms was the original hardwoods. They had the coolest band of dark wood inlay along the edges. They just don't make 'em like that anymore, do they? It would've been cool if we had been able to refinish them, but this house had a major fire 10 years ago and many of the floor were ripped up due to fire and water damage. The ones that remained were badly warped and stained.

Off we go with the installation down the hallway!

See the original hardwoods to the left of the new ones? This is the back bedroom (and also my office). Someone had a field day splattering and/or tracking paint on them at some point!

Here's my office from the other side with the floors finished.

It's amazing what a huge different new floors and fresh paint can make.

I think I'll save the first floor progress for the next reno post since this one is getting super long! The house is coming along, that's for sure, and I can't wait to get in there. We've got lots of little things left to do, but ready or not, we're moving this weekend!

More to come!

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