Milestones!

SO, June 2006,

we purchased some oak hardwood flooring in high hopes of getting it laid and installed and able to enjoy sometime that year.

(photos of our kitchen dining area,
early on in our home owning)

OUR GOAL when we purchased the hardwood was to have hardwood flooring in the kitchen/dining room/great room and down the hall so the only carpet we have in our house is in our living room and bedrooms.

HOWEVER,
nothing in our life is easy at all!

(my hubby is what you call a
"jack of all trades"..."a do-it-your-selfer"

(IN FACT, as I am typing this, he is replacing all four struts in my car)

and SO since there are only so many hours in the day and only SO much of Tracy to go around, our projects always take longer than they would for most families.

However, any project that he does,
it is amazing when he finishes it!!  He definitely has the magic touch!
I am truly in AWE at the amazing talent he has in every area of life.
I don't think that there's anything in this world that he cannot do...
and that makes me a VERY lucky woman!

SO,

Since the only place we have had to watch TV
is in our great room which is in the kitchen/dining room, it meant that we needed to move our TV watching area to somewhere different when we laid the hardwood, but since we have been trying to wipe out debt, it didn't leave any extra wiggle room, for furring out and insulating the basement.

(the boys room when Ethan was just a toddler)

Fast forward to March 2010...

Tracy had the brilliant idea to
think outside the box
and make a TV watching/computer area in one of the bedrooms.

SO,
we pulled the boys out of the bigger bedroom
and made it into a cozy little TV/computer room and
we moved the boys into the smaller bedroom complete with new bunk-beds.

After we painted the rooms and swapped furniture around we didn't make any other headway on projects...the summer got away from us with non-stop obligations...between Tracy's work schedule, being Scout Master and wanting to have FUN with our kids during the summer, there was pretty much no free time to work on much of anything. But, that's okay.

Thank goodness I'm a VERY patient wife!!

Panorama of our new
TV/computer room

This is what you see
when you walk in the room

This is the view
while sitting on the couch
(HOWEVER, it's a good thing that projects take us so long to accomplish, because we usually end up changing our mind and end up with something MUCH better. That is the case for our TV watching room.
We are actually in the middle of changing that all around...can't wait to finish that project and post photos.)

This is the boys room...
we still have to build in shelving and lockers for them.

Fast forward to

September 11th, 2010

and this is what happened that day...

Carpet gets torn up...

I'm absolutely disgusted with the amount of DIRT on our sub floor after we pulled up the carpet and pad.
GROSS!!
You would never know that
I vacuumed every single day of my life!!

Ethan Kip was the hardest working kid that day.

He didn't ever stop working.

Hauling out the carpet...

Our neighbor boy Logan
came over and helped with the demolition of our kitchen floor.
The kids had SO much fun tearing up the floor!!

Excited to raise the cabinet

above our fridge so that it will be able to accommodate the hardwood floor AND to add a nice line to our kitchen cabinets.

Jade busy vacuuming up

all of the dust, nails and other other garbage from the floor.

Hardwood all stacked in our house

and hopefully it won't be too long, before we can actually start laying it down.

STILL lots to do...

we've got to finish pulling up moldings, redo a door jam, re-sheet rock an area, PAINT, build in shelves and the list goes on until we can finally start laying down the oak flooring.

Tracy using a special tool to cut off the bottom of all of the door trim to accommodate the wood flooring.

Once the flooring is laid,

then there will be LOTS of puttying holes/cracks on the floor and then sanding the perimeter and edges with hand sanders and then sanding the main area with a large sander and then staining and varnishing and then sanding with 220 grit sandpaper and then varnishing again(that last sanding and varnishing has to be done three times to get a good protective layer on the hardwood).
and then sanding, painting and attaching all of the baseboards again (which is going to be LOTS of work) and finishing our built-in shelves and doing finish trim work.
OH, and we have to tile the laundry room and finish our bathroom and we have to put up back-splashes in our kitchen as that never got done when we moved in our house.
AND crossing my fingers that we will be able to figure out how to add a stained checkerboard effect in my kitchen area

It makes me tired just thinking about

all we have left to do.

It will be SO nice and
so worth it when it is done!

So, if I am not in the Blog world much, it is because I am trying to make the best use of my afternoons, trying to
ease the burdens of Mr. Smith to help speed this Home Improvement project so we can have it all done in time to host Thanksgiving Dinner at our house this year...
which will be here before we know it.

Chaos, mess and all,

I have the most WONDERFUL life in the world and I wouldn't trade it for anything!

Life is SO good...

especially when we're all home together as a family each evening!

Hope all of my friends and family
have a wonderful week!