Temporarily moving out

It's hard right now to look at these pictures...as it seems like forever ago that we had to literally move out of over half of our house!!! When we made the decision that we were going to rip up the carpet upstairs and refinish all the hardwood floors and did a "trial" tear up of our upstairs hallway on our anniversary, I had already started dreading this whole process. Refinishing hardwood floors? Awesome. Moving out of the upstairs and middle level of our house (over 1000 sq ft)? Terrible.

But sitting at our kitchen table right now admiring the new floor color - I'm so happy we sucked it up and did it - because I LOVE the floors (which is good, because if I hated them, I would have been a little bitter of this whole process, right??)

Let me start by showing you what exactly our house looked like mid-process. That will make you appreciate this change a little bit more - because we all know that every home improvement project takes some work, sacrifice and a disruption in your everyday life. Wow - that makes home project sounds awful, however - when it's over...it's all worth it.

So what was the process? Well I showed you our college bed as we started to pack up our house and move what we could. Then the weekend that I left for Katie's bachelorette party - that post is coming soon - Jimmy was there for our floor guy to come test colors and then guide the movers to move all the big furniture to somewhere else in our house. Somehow, they found extra space in the family room downstairs, the garage or the basement. But when I walked in that Monday night, this is what I saw. Wow!!

Our downstairs family room:

What the basement "entrance" looked like....not much of an entrance

Oh and here's our kitchen - as you can see, there was not much cooking going on that week. But at least they blocked it off from the dining room in case there was dust stragglers...

Want to take a nap?? Try the garage...

So here is what they had to do first: sand down the floors. This is in our living room, which already had hardwood floors, but we refinished them along with the upstairs floors so they could all match.

And the stairs - ah the uncarpeted stairs! I was super pumped for these. We still need to paint the steps white underneath - but still, much better!

They were obviously kind of in between on this job..

But boy oh boy, the first time a dog threw up on those floors - I couldn't have been more excited to just have to wipe it up and then clean the hardwood floors vs. sitting there scrubbing the dirty gross carpet and having the smell linger.

Hmmmm- odd that is the thing I get excited about, but it's true. Ok - finished pictures to come!!!