Home Improvement

Our home improvement jobs never take the form of do-it-yourself. My hubs is blessed with skill in the kitchen, but none at all when it homes to fixing up. I can live with hiring out.

Such was the case when last week the house exterior was painted, and I got my orange wall in the living room. Next up was to have the old carpet removed from the master bedroom closet that comes off the master bathroom. Before and after. We really like this, but it didn't - poof! - appear. The tile color is "sand" and when some of the tiles didn't match, it took a while to figure out that the installer didn't have a die lot problem, but a box of "mushroom" - the wrong color! Of course, those tiles had to be taken back out. Then there was grouting three days later, followed by caulking. The closet didn't look normal for five days. 

After tiling came laminate. The builder's grade carpeting put in five years ago when the house was built (come February), was showing dirt and wear, in spite of cleaning. Time to make it better.

However, I really didn't think through how much work it would be to empty my sewing room, that being the first room to be tackled. Piles of machines, chairs, notions, tools, fabric, bins, etc. were everywhere in the living area.

We also emptied the guest room, since that was flooring room number two.

To make it easier to move the fabric cabinet in my sewing room, I unloaded it. That was the easy part! What was way more effort was putting it all back again. But see how much more organized it is? In fact, I had enough space to move a few closet fabrics - like text prints, and my new Eureka collection by Emma Jean Jansen - into the cabinet too. I'm not kidding myself that this will stay looking so good, but I'm admiring it while I can.

It's been a ton of work to do this, as I was sorting and reorganizing everything that came out of and went back into the rooms, and then wiping off, vacuuming, and mopping the rooms as the work was done. Everything had a fine layer of dust on it, including furniture in the living room.

This is the finished guest room. I do think the room looks richer now.

And the master bedroom. I love white furniture and think it looks even better with the wood floor. 

Bill did a beautiful job laying flooring in all three rooms.

The sewing room change from carpeting to laminate. 

But the room isn't yet settled. Because the floor needs to be protected, everything now has felt pads underneath. Except those two black, home improvement store, plastic sawhorses aren't going to work anymore. So, it's off to IKEA to get two more of the white wooden "trestles," like on the left. They're adjustable height too, so that's a bonus. Also, I need a rug at the end of the cutting table, for long-term standing. I've ordered new rubber casters for my two sewing chairs to replace the hard plastic ones that could damage the floor. Until those arrive, I won't be sewing in here. 😒

What we didn't anticipate was how not having carpeting would affect Hogan! He seems a little lost, as today's he's wandered into the guest room and my sewing room, and back out again, looking for a soft lay-down spot. And, he wasn't totally successful at jumping up on his window bench in the sewing room. He couldn't get traction. The borrowed rug will suffice until I find something better.

I sat down to write this blog post after using the Hoover floor scrubber to clean all the tile in the house because, rightly so, the paths from the front door to the bedrooms were pretty dirty from the workers.

Once I have sewing room time again, I want to make a couple of these, to keep my sewing machine foot control(s) from sliding across the floor. Oh, but I can't wait! Linda

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