Hey Everyone! Hope you had a wonderful and relaxing holiday weekend. You may have noticed we took a few days off from blogging but not from working!
Anyway, I’ve talked a little about our upstairs room before. This is how it looked when we bought the house.
The staircase leading up to it even had some ummmm. . . . adorable houses stenciled on them.
Well, we got rid of the houses and even managed to make a few other improvements to the space, but it was still basically just the catch-all room in desperate need of a design plan!
You can see in the photo above we installed a wood wall, added bead board, and painted the walls white. I also painted the window inset black. I tried once before to get things in gear and completed a few more projects in the space- like the patriotic entry wall below.
I also had Tim install this Integrated Book Shelf that he created a while back.
And that’s about as far as I got. . . until now!
In light of our big news, we decided it was time to tackle and defeat this design challenge of a room once and for all! First on our order of business- get rid of that crappy carpet!!!! I had pulled up a corner of it a long time ago to see what was hiding underneath so I knew there was wood flooring. I didn’t know I’d have to go through four layers to get to it.
First, there was the carpet and then the carpet pad.
Next came this lovely layer of linoleum- luckily it came out pretty easy. Oh and if you need a tip on removing carpet, we always cut ours into 3-5 ft strips to make for an easier clean-up.
I thought you would definitely want to see a close up of that linoleum! Pretty awesome.
Much to our surprise, underneath the lino was a layer of old newspapers! I always get excited about finding stuff like this during renovations! You may remember our post about finding the World War II newspapers. Well I was excited to see if these papers would have any historical significance as well.
Unfortunately there didn’t seem to be any big headlines staring back at us and the papers were much younger (from 1960) than the ones we found before.
There were a lot of sales ads that made my jaw drop!
$150 for those mid century modern beauties!!! Umm, yes please! (Obviously, I am not talking about the top sofa pictured.)
So, we finally got all the layers up and out of the space and revealed this wood floor!! Adios crappy carpet, hello gorgeous wood grain!
Ok, it’s not gorgeous just yet but trust me it will be!!! 🙂 That and tons of other projects coming soon!
PS- I am putting together a post that includes photos from projects that my readers have taken on after being inspired by something they’ve seen on the blog! I would love to include your project too- please e-mail high quality photos if you took on one of my DIY’s or tweaked one of my projects to make it your own!
See you tomorrow!