House Work: Underfoot

I'm so excited we're finally getting started on our first 'big project' for the house! Sure, my muscle man has changed a leaky faucet in the downstairs bathroom, and we've done a pretty significant amount of the painting already, but those were super easy compared to this one!

New FLOOORS!!!

When we first put in the offer on our house (way back in April, yay short sales!) I wasn't totally sold on the house but agreed to put in the offer my muscle man wanted because a) it was way under what they were asking, and b)because if we actually got the house for that, I could replace the nasty carpets with hardwoods! So to my total surprise, our offer was accepted and now we finally have the house, so now it's time for me to get my hardwoods!

 (just a little sneak peak for now, I'll show off my final choice of color/stain next time around!!) 

And now that we've got the wood acclimating to the house, the real work can start...

The carpet came up easily enough, but for some reason the builder's decided it would be hilarious to staple the carpet pad into the subfloor every inch or so... Which meant someone (the muscle man decided that would be me =P) had to pull up all these stupid little staples before we could start working on leveling the subfloor...

We're thinking (hoping... and it appears we are correct...) that 15 years of spills in the same area of a carpet are not good for the subfloor underneath... It doesn't appear that the boards are warped or unsound, they do not creak or bow (which is why we're pretty sure it's just a pattern of accident prone former owners, I'm sure there's a similar spot in our old house under the edge of the sofa, where we kicked over quite a few glasses when we didn't have a coffee table to set them on)... But there are some areas where the moisture has caused some swelling, so we went and got a sander to smooth it down to prepare for our wood floors, my muscle man took over most of that duty, I don't have the biceps for it haha! =)

So far so good, we still have the dining room to do, but at least the living room is staple free, carpet tack free, and on its way to being fully sanded down!