Productive day! But now where are we going to sleep?

So we’ve been undecided how to finish my bathroom. Well we know, but aren’t sure we want to commit to a full gut job. It remains in a total disarray.

But we wanted to actually get a project done.

We have a bit of a problem sometimes with the finishing the job part.

So we went to town this morning to look at options for our bedroom.

We haven’t touched it since we moved in. It is carpeted, and has a green striped and flowered wallpaper on the bottom half of the walls. We hated it, but it always seems to be the last room to get decorated.

Today we picked out a laminate floor for the room.

I’m a carpet person. I love warmth under my feet. But then I became a pet person, and I really don’t think the two go together. Especially with our moist climate, I find the carpet in this house is always so stinky of pets. And with my allergies and occasional asthma, I think I’ll be better off with a carpet free bedroom. The bedroom carpet is original too I think – so about 23 or so years old. Time to go!

(I am very afraid the floor will be freezing though. The woodstove is two floors away. I guess the electric baseboards we put on at night sometimes will warm them up. I’ve always got slippers or Crocs on anyway.)

We have some hardwood on the main floor of the house and the dog’s nails have done a real number to it. We’ve also done laminate before, a real cheap kind, just to add some polish to my last house before I sold it, so we knew what we wanted and what we didn’t. I love hardwood, but I don’t think there is any reason to go to that expense for a bedroom. We really need a hard floor that won’t be shredded with dog’s nails though. And I hate how some of those laminate floors sound really loud and artificial. I also wanted a laminate that isn’t too shiny.

The guy at Benjamin Moore knows us by name because we are in there every couple of months poking around, asking questions, looking at options, and rarely ever making a final decision. He recommended a couple we might like, and we did!

We picked out a flooring, AND bought paint! This is real progress!

We’re in the midst of a heavy rain fall warning this weekend. We are supposed to get dumped on, and THEN Hurricane Ophelia is predicted to stall off the coast here before it hits Newfoundland and soak us again.

What a perfect weekend for some indoor chores.

So we emptied the room of furniture, and then ripped out the carpet and the underlay.

What a relief!!

We found a couple curious things though…

First – the vinyl flooring from both of the bathrooms is covering a foot wide swath against the edge of the wall bordering the bathrooms. So strange. One side, furthest from the wall was coated with a hundred staples into the floor. I even called Dad to see if he could make sense of it.

But later I figured it out. Our house is a manufactured house that originally came in four pieces. It looks to me like they started their roll of vinyl in the bedroom and put flooring down in each of the bathrooms before the wall was put up! Sure enough the vinyl continues right under the wall. So we trimmed it off and cut it out.

The other curious thing is the attachment of the two sides of the house. The front and back of the house join up across the floor of the master bedroom. There is one long header piece that is about 4 inches wide, and the plywood subfloor butts up to it on other side. The entire join is coated with something white. Some sort of joint compound or something. The settling of the house has cracked open the join on either side and unfortunately the floor is not flat. The floor is lower on either side of that join, especially in one half of the room. We really don’t want that noticeable when we put down the laminate so we might have to sand it down a bit. It will mostly be under the bed, but we don’t want it noticeable.

We must have pulled hundreds of staples out of the floor from the carpet underlay. We could have hammered them in, but when it’s your own house I guess we just wanted it perfect. The subfloor is very well nailed into place, but there are a few squeaks so we plan to add some screws to make it perfect.

After a break for dinner we went back up and got all the wallpaper and the border off. We just used the wallpaper removing compound in water and a sponge and after it was wet it scraped off fairly easily. Didn’t take longer than 90 minutes to get the entire room done.

The plan is to paint this week before we put the floor down. Hopefully everything goes well and we’re done in October! Dad suggested we don’t put the bed back in there so we work faster!

We have yet to decide where we are going to sleep tonight!

Oh, so you want to know the colours we chose?

Here you go:

The colours don’t look quite the same on the monitor as on the paint chips, but they are typical forestry chick and hunter outdoorsy dude colours 🙂

We plan on using the White Down colour for the ceiling and the top of some of the walls (it’s a Cape Cod house and because of the window dormer we have several ceilings/walls/angles). We might do a couple walls that are full height with the Backwoods green right to the ceiling – haven’t decided yet. And we’ll stick with our white trim and doors. I think the White Down is far enough away from the white trim colour that it will be a nice contrast. Only one way to find out though!