The living room

 So the living room wasn't in bad shape at all.  It had really nice big windows letting in tons and tons of sunlight and once we took that wall out it was a pretty decent size.  We just needed to pull out the carpet and figure out what kind of floor to put back in.

That wasn't so easy though.  We knew we didn't want carpet since we pretty well destroyed the carpet in our last place. But still the choices were endless, bamboo, hard wood, laminate, and then what kind of color did we want, light wood hides dust but darker stains looked pretty classy.  

We finally decided on this greyish wash distressed laminate in a extra wide plank.  We decided with our lifestyle and 5 super messy and destructive kids we needed something really durable.

John does flooring all the time at work so he knew what he was doing with this one.  First you lay out the underlayment and tape it together so the sub-flooring is completely covered.

  We started at about 3:00 in the afternoon and battled with the kids for the rest of the afternoon trying to keep them from making holes in the underlayment and from taking off with random planks of flooring. 

Once they finally went to bed we were able to really get moving.  This picture was taken at about 10:30 p.m.

The process is simple, measure:

cut:

bang bang bang:

I have to stop and mention for a minute the incredible sacrifice of time and manual labor and emotional support by parents during this huge job.  They were with us every single day.  They lifted drywall, changed diapers, painted walls, cut up watermelon, chased around kids.  They even stayed up all night long on flooring night until this job was done.  I always suspected my parents were just about the very best people on the planet but I know that for sure after having gone through this home renovation with their help..

This picture was taken at about 1 a.m. The living room was done now for the dining/kitchen.

They made me go to bed at about 2:30 since I was going to have to deal with kids in the morning.  

By the way, this was our bed for about 3 weeks once it starting becoming a hassle to drive back and forth every day.

This is what it looked like when I went to bed. 

At about 6:45 am, John finally came and got into his sleeping bag and whispered to me that the flooring Santa had come and left us a new floor.  Here's what it looked like when I got up. 

So John and my parents installed the entire living room, dining room, and kitchen floor in one night.  I'm sure our neighbors didn't appreciate our table saw and banging all night long but it seemed like the only way to get it done without the kids around.  The day after that we rested.. my poor husband and my old parents needed it pretty bad.  After that it started getting kind of fun.  We brought over our curtains and hung them up.

I bought the most luxurious shaggy carpet I've ever seen.

After weeks of walking around on floors covered in sawdust and wet paint and scrap lumber my kids were in heaven with this comfy rug.  They just kept rolling around on it.  In fact they still do.

After that my husband took the three older kids and went on the family annual camping trip in Wyoming for a week and I kept the two baby girls and finished up the move at home.  

 We had slowly been making trips with what we could fit in our van all along but there was still an enormous amount of work to do.  My brothers all met me at my old place one afternoon and we got a ton of it and then me and parents got the rest.  I couldn't believe that week how hard I was able to push my body.  Most of the heavy lifting and manual labor in my life is done by my insanely strong and capable husband but with him gone I was able to do so much more than I thought I was capable of.   It was good for me.

Like the day I pulled all the old carpets out of the bedrooms and then loaded it into the truck and then my mom and I took it to the DUMP!!  That is no place for ladies, but we did it and that makes us awesome.

Finally the day I had been waiting for since the very beginning of the whole thing, IKEA DAY!!

The receipt was long, it was fun.

So here's the living room before:

The entire mood of the house started to come together when I made this engineering print at Staples  of our family song.  We sing this song every family night so I loved the idea of putting it up on the wall.  It made a huge impact in the room so everything else was sort of built around it.

So here was phase one of the living room:

After some accessorizing here it is today:

The window wall before:

and after:

The living room and dining room before:

and after:

So last time we were looking from the living room into the entry way:

Now we turn around from the entry way into the living room.

The one thing I really really wanted in any house we ended up buying was tons of natural light.  That's something we haven't had in the last several places we lived and this place definitely has natural light.  It's such a mood lifter.  

Next up, the kitchen...oh boy, that was a crazy adventure...