Refinishing the Floors + Living Room

I'm first going to say that we absolutely LOVE living in our new home.  Nate loves only driving at the most 15 minutes to work, he loves the HUGE backyard (which half was quickly tilled up and seedlings planted), we love living in a smaller home, but bigger bedrooms (maybe I can keep a smaller home clean), we love the wood floors, we love all the windows, and we love the area around us.  Nate discovered a feed/garden store just down the road from us.  It takes major will power to not eat out all the time at the "real" mexican restaurant just up the street from us, and the girls love the park that leads into Tandy Hills which is just one block up from us.  Other perks, we are now 45 minutes away from IKEA instead of an hour, we don't have an HOA, we have trees in our neighborhood...I could go on and on.  

So we didn't make it into the house before Christmas, but I quickly got over that dream and had a very relaxing Christmas weekend with my parents at the old house.  But we quickly moved in the week after Christmas.  It's been taking a long time to settle.  Is one ever really settled in a home? We still have a lot to do, like finish replacing doors, painting doors, painting some of the trim, running some electricity to the living room ceiling so we can install an overhead light/fan, painting the doors to the kitchen/bathroom cabinets, switching out the outlets to be three prong, switching out the old light switches to clean, white switches, installing an attic door/ladder...those are just the big things.  There are a handful of little things still to be done.  And then once we get the old house rented out and the weather turns warmer, we will start tearing down and expanding the mud/laundry room.  But, all these things can be done while still enjoying and living in the new house. 

I was finally able to download some pictures to our computer, so let's talk wood floors. 

This is what the living room looked like before we did anything.  There was some termite damaged boards, plus we wanted to take out the square. 

Which is what we did here. 

Nate ended up needing to take out more, but this is the floor with the new wood.  Nate was very grateful to a friend who let him borrow a table saw for the project. He replaced most of the hallway, and an area in Toby's room, but I'll show those when I post their before/after pictures.  

I've helped my dad lay wood floor, plus Nate and I refinished the wood floors in our Arkansas home, so we had some experience.  We did a much better job on this refinish than our Arkansas home, but we still went away from the project with some things we would do differently to make it turn out better.  

We renting a drum sander and edging sander from Home Depot and a random orbiting sander from Lowe's.  I have a funny/frustrating story about our rental from Lowe's. It's kind of a long story, but the short version is the sander apparently never gets rented out because only one Lowe's employee knew about the sander, and that person was hard to find.  They almost didn't let me return the machine because they insisted it was from another store..like Home Depot.  And then I was accused of returning the machine in pieces, but after showing them how it was made to take apart for transportation and how easy it was to put back together, I was cleared of this accusation.  It was a frustrating morning because I had to drive 40 minutes to this particular Lowe's store, and I had the three littles with me..but Lowe's redeemed themselves by not charging me anymore days for the rental. So I guess the frustration was worth the $120 we saved.  Maybe that was the long version.

Back to the floors. Here is Nate drum sanding away (In Toby's room)

The kitchen is were the girls and the boy stayed.  We sanded a good full 4 days...into the wee hours of the morning.  Our kids are pretty flexible, but we were all very happy when it was done. 

Okay, so I don't have any pictures of the new floors without any of our stuff in it.  I kept forgetting my camera when we were laying the finish.  But here are some more before and after pictures!!

 BEFORE:

DURING:

AFTER:

With some pinterest inspiration, I found a solution to our no coat closet issue.  (I'll be happy when winter is over and more fun knobs will be visible.)

So, that is the living room.  We still need to hide cords, and I need to fix the wheels on the blanket wagon, and put the cover over the red sofa chair, but we feel settled in the living room and LOVE it.