Y’all, I’m so excited to share this. So! Excited!
Let’s just jump right in – because, really, I can’t wait any longer.
Mmmmm. Yeah, that’s my dining room. I’m in love.
But, let’s back up for a second.
We haven’t been doing much (or, anything) to the house lately. We’re trying to take care of some debt and get a few things in order before we take on any more house projects, so things have more or less been on hold around here. But. We had a few things brewing that added up to disaster. I’ll let you guess. We had…
– Decade-old (at least) carpet.
– Three dogs
– A doggy door
– A backyard. With dirt.
– Rain
– A baby who is getting ready to learn how to crawl.
Do you know what happens when you add all of those ingredients together? You know what, don’t guess, I’ll just tell you.
Yeah, that happens.
And I can tell you with certainty that it was much worse in person than it looks in these photos. It was awful. We’ve always dealt with this when it rains, because the dogs love to track in mud; but it’s never been more annoying than now, when we have a baby who loves to spend time hanging out on the floor. We’ve tried all sorts of things but nothing we could do really kept the carpet clean enough (and honestly, who has the energy to clean three sets of dog paws every single time they go outside?) and I finally reached the end of my rope. Corey and I talked about it and decided that there was really no good reason for us to wait.
We happened to have the money to take care of the floor (which doesn’t happen often!) so we decided to jump in and go for it. In the end, it’s totally worth it to delay getting rid of our debt by a few months if it means we get to enjoy this floor in the meantime.
This is the same flooring we used in Jackson’s room – just plain old vinyl plank flooring. Peel and stick, y’all. And I love it. It’s durable, it’s easy to lay down, and I don’t have to stress when the dogs scratch it up because it’s cheap. And it looks fantastic, to boot.
I won’t detail the process (because I already did that here), but I will add that it was slightly different than it was upstairs, since we have concrete subfloors down here. It just meant a little more cleaning/sanding and we had to fill in some holes from the carpet tacks, but other than that it was the same basic idea!
(Jack was a great helper!)
And now?
I don’t have to stress about nasty, stained, smelly carpet in my dining room. My living room, unfortunately, is still a carpeted mess, but we’ll be fixing that in the next few weeks! Getting the dining room done just made me that much more excited to get the living room done too, and I can’t wait to get started. And now, I don’t have to worry if I want to put Jackson down on the floor for a bit – it may not be quite as soft underneath him, but I’m actually able to keep it clean and we can always get a rug. It’s the best feeling ever to actually have my house look a little cleaner on a daily basis without any extra effort – that carpet just looked nasty!
Anyone else do any flooring updates lately? Please tell me we aren’t the only ones with completely nasty carpet!