Ladies and Gentleman We Have a Living Room!

AAAaaaaa!! It’s true! We have a real live living room with a floor! Can you believe it?!?

The couch is finally actually sitting in the living room. It’s kind of shocking actually.

It is really quite amazing to be sitting in a chair and laying on a couch in a living room that is for all true purposes…..finished. It needs art and definitely needs some curtains but I just couldn’t wait to show it to you guys.

If you need a refresher of where we started check out this post.

Here’s a quick before (from before we moved in):

I’d just like to again point out that this is not our stuff haha.

 And this is what the floor looked like before:

You can check out our initial prep of the floor post here.

We cruised through the first 2/3rds of the flooring pretty quickly….I’d say over 3 days or so of a few sessions.

Since the house is so tiny we decided to spare ourselves the disrupt of moving everything out of the living room and just pushed it to the sides of where we worked.

Then we got stalled out with it for a while. Always frustrating. The front of the fireplace and inside of it has old tile that needed to be chipped up and we had trouble with getting it knocked out. A few hour long sessions only gave me this and most of it had already been chipped up before I got to it:

Grrr. So we decided since it was much less important to us then being able to use the living room and working on the backsplash in the kitchen, that we would finish the vinyl as close as possible and then stick our rug over the top of the unfinished section until we can get to it. Because this just wasn’t working:

Saturday afternoon Leah came over to help me finish prepping the house for our girls night and we finished the last 1/3 of the room’s tiling, cleaned like maniacs and drug all the living room furniture out of various not-so-hidden hiding spots. We were really excited to be able to go from that to this in time for the party:

What is also exciting is that this means no more chair in the middle of our bedroom, and that the couch and hope chest are FINALLY out of Noah’s room. Poor kid lives in a room that feels like a storage closet in a pack and play. Sigh. Oh well, eventually he will have an awesome room and until then he doesn’t know the difference. Right?

My hope is that by the time he is 1….which is less than a month away (can you believe that?!?), that he will actually have a crib setup and ready to go. Which means I need to get on it already.

Regardless the child has been freed from the confines of the kitchen and he is more than a little thrilled about it.

So far he has decided that pulling all the dirt out of mommy’s plant and sneaking under the chair to play with the wires for the telephone/internet are the coolest new things. Anyone got any genius ideas on baby proofing either of these things? We cannot relocate them out of his reach unfortunately. The inlet for the internet cable is in the corner of the room where the table is and the plant needs enough sunlight and it cannot get that anywhere else.

He is totally obsessed the windows, they are just the perfect height so he can see out into the front yard. He will literally stand and stare out the window for 5-10 minutes at a time. For a kid that never sits still that is saying a lot.

He is also in love with the elliptical, patting Cocoa while she tries her best to stay out of his grip, and climbing in and out of the bookshelf between the hallway and living room.

As I was reading through the before post, I realized that I haven’t posted any photos up of the bookshelf that we put in the old heaters place! Which is a shame because its beautiful. Kevin’s brother Alex came over about a year ago and did a ton of work on the house with Kevin. He is a jack of all trades but a particularly good finish carpenter so we stuck him on this project right away.

All of the shelves are adjustable in height so we just remove one shelf when we need more room for tall items. It also has been wonderful because as Noah has gotten more mobile and started pulling things down on himself we have been able to just remove the shelves entirely so he can pass through from room to room.

We have a few other projects to share from this room still. Kevin’s been working on fixing the threshold and I DIY’ed our awesome fan/light combo that is up there currently.

Plus we are currently in full on backsplash mode in the kitchen so have no fear….we’ll be back with more for you soon!