Eli and Hub's Room Renovations

Joseph and I have little to no experience when it comes to renovating. We can paint and work a screw driver, but that is the extent of our expertise when it comes to renovation projects around the home. Joseph has a little more experience in that department than I do, but not much- Sorry Joseph...

We came up with the bright idea that we would try to teach ourselves how to do some renovations. We decided to start with the easy (or what we thought would be easy) task of ripping up the carpet in Eli and Hub's bedrooms located on the third floor of our home. 

The above picture is of Eli's room. We had no clue as to what we would find under this carpet. Our initial intentions were that if it was something we could not work with, then we could lay laminate flooring down. It turns out that there was actually 2 layers of carpet. The top layer was a beige/cream colored carpet. We pull that back to reveal this lovely (I say that sarcastically) orange carpet.  We pulled the orange carpet back to reveal that the ugly orange carpet had begun to break down. It left this lovely black dust that covered everything.

Once we threw the carpet out the window, (Yes, we actually threw it out the window. I wasn't going to haul that nasty carpet all throughout my house and make an even bigger mess.) we had this lovely pile of black dust to clean up. 

Underneath the black dusty stuff, revealed beautiful hardwood floors. Eli, Hub, and Joseph were tasked with pulling the carpet tape up. That particular task only resulted in a few injuries, but, hey, that is all part of the fun!

Here is the finished or somewhat finished product. The floors have actually been painted. I do not know what the previous owners would paint hardwood floors, but they did. Joseph and I decided that for now we would leave them like they are. We plan to sand them down and refinish them. My brother-in-law, David, is confident that we can do that. He says staining and refinishing is not hard. That story will be for another blog post. 

The bed was actually my father's bed from his childhood home. The red rocking chair was my father's as well. Our boys like to sleep together at night. Aren't they just adorable in their new room? :) 

After finishing Eli's room, we moved on Hub's room. Again, both the hallway and Hub's bedroom had a beige/ cream colored carpet with that ugly 1960s carpet underneath. I was a bit disappointed when we pulled up both layers of carpet and discovered this yucky Formica flooring. As you can see we had a good bit of cleaning to do with all this black yucky stuff. It was EVERYWHERE!

We decided to rip up the Formica to see what was underneath and much to our surprise, we found pinewood flooring! This flooring will have to be refinished as well, which we plan on doing soon!

Of course, refinishing floors takes something called time and that project will have to be reserved for another weekend. For now, the boys are enjoying their rooms as they are a work in progress.