One room down...

...and the rest of the house still to go. One more room to do before we can move in!

Finished the baby's room:

It turns out reinstalling the closet doors was about a thousand times easier than taking them down, so YAY! I only cut myself once doing it (I am pretty much covered from head to foot in bruises and cuts from moving boxes and splinters and who knows what else).



When I installed the laminate, I took the dire warnings about leaving an adequate expansion gap a little TOO seriously, so had to get a little fancy with the molding around the floor - I couldn't just use quarter round because it wouldn't cover all the gaps, so they wound up a bit more complicated (I had to use an extra piece of wood behind the quarter round). I think they look pretty darn good, despite the fact that my ability to use a miter box certainly needs work (a few of the joints are not that great).

Technically, it's not 100% complete - I need to get a router to make some cutouts to go around the molding in the transition piece that goes under the door. Eh, that can wait.

Next step, finishing the master bedroom:


The greyish strip along the wall is floor levelling compound. Hopefully I won't need to do another application and I'll be able to start laying the floor on Saturday. If it does need more leveller, the floor can't be installed until Sunday to ensure the levelling compound is fully cured.

The trim and the door have been primed, but not painted the final colour. That's the last thing that needs to happen before the flooring going in!

So, looking forward - get the flooring laid, re-hang the closet doors, paint and install the trim (this time I'm painting the damn trim FIRST). Then we can move in!

What'll be the next project? The kitchen. I'm going to buy the paint tomorrow...

See? Ugly. Also there's this to be dealt with, currently living in our dining room:

Fun with flooring

I laid the laminate in the baby's room today. It was both easier and harder than I was expecting, and I made a few rookie mistakes that I will learn from when I tackle the master bedroom. Overall, I think it looks pretty good.

Here's the baby's room after priming - note the lovely carpet. I can't imagine why we decided to take it out!

We took down the ugly sliding closet doors so we could lay the laminate. I am DREADING putting them back up.

Here's the flooring (and you can see the new wall and trim colours):

Finally, I started installing the quarter round to hide the expansion gaps:

And then I got tired, so the quarter round is only about half done. After that's in, it needs to be painted, the closet doors have to go back up (SHUDDER), and then it's ready!

We're in!!!!!

Boy, has it been an intense couple of days. And while we've gotten a lot more done than we thought we would, there's still a looooooooong way to go.

So far, we've stripped this wallpaper border off in the master bedroom:

We also primed and put on the first coat of paint. It's a sage-y green. The trim will be white. So most of the painting in this room is still left to do.

We've also done a lot of work in the baby's room. We've primed, put on two coats of a light lavender paint, and done one coat on the trim. S also ripped out all the carpet and nailboards, pulled out the staples, and moved 6 (HEAVY) boxes of laminate into the room to acclimate so we can start laying the floor on Tuesday. We've run into an issue where the floor is NOT level, but I'm fairly certain it's because the subfloor was nailed down, and we can fix the problem by adding screws in between the nails (which should also fix the squeakiness). And there were two seperate trips to Home Depot this morning, resulting in one very tired and cranky baby.

Tonight, when the baby goes to bed, I'll go put a second coat of paint on the trim in the baby's room and touch up a few places. I'll also try and get at least part of the second coat of paint on the master bedroom before I keel over from exhaustion. I'll also try and take some photos and upload them if I can manage to hold the camera steady!

Edit: Here's the master with two coats of paint and the carpet ripped out:

Again, the floor isn't level, and on this one we'll have to use floor leveller since the drop is pretty dramatic against the wall you can see on the righthand side of the photo. The rest of it seems OK, so it shouldn't be too big a problem.