Goodbye Carpet, Hello Hardwood!

For a while now, we have been discussing re-doing the floor in our living room. Our kitchen is already hardwood (you can see in the bottom right corner the start of the kitchen floor) and Ty, being the lover of all-things-wood, was sweet to give me an option: hardwood the living room or hardwood the living room...

I, being the lover of all-things-cozy, consented to his plan with the understanding that we would have to purchase a large, cozy and lovely area rug. The compromise was agreed upon and our floor mission began!

10+ Year Old, Nasty, Dirty, Dingy (get my drift?) Carpet

My hottie DIY Husband hard at work

It was seriously so gross when we began tearing up the carpet. Dust, dog hair (we do not own a dog...), and only the good Lord knows what else was flying in my face as we began to destruct our living room floor.

I'm going to go ahead and hope say that he is aiming for the nail gun, not my head in this picture.

(He was getting slightly tired at this point; there were some pretty close calls with the mallet!)

Despite the drama that we have faced this spring with saws and fingers, I cautiously consented to run the miter saw to cut the board pieces down to size. Ty and Tim were inside laying/nailing the planks, so after Gina left it became my job to cut the wood on the saw. I'm not going to lie... I felt like a total HGTV DIY-er after about 10 boards.

Our garage today, HGTV tomorrow

Here is part two of the flooring project tale:

About 2/3 of the floor got laid on Monday. On Wednesday, we headed to Springfield to get the rest of the hardwood to finish it out. We took Ty's Patriot (smaller SUV) and he claimed that the boxes would easily fit. Not so. This was our riding arrangement on the way home from Springfield:

I felt like we were on a 2-seater bicycle. Let's just say the conversations were interesting.

On the way back to Bolivar, about 10 miles from home, we ran over something small on the highway. We didn't think anything about it until 5 miles later when we heard the back right tire going flat. (It adds to the drama of this saga to point out that just a few minutes before this, it began raining/lightening/slightly storming.) We pulled over and Ty said there was a huge gash in the tire from whatever we had hit. Plus, the weight of the flooring on that side probably didn't help matters.

The only big problem we had was that in order to get to the spare tire, Ty had to move all of the boxes of flooring that we had in the car AND it was raining! So, seeing as it was after 10:00 p.m. and both of our dads were likely already an hour into their beauty sleep for the night, we gave my brother a call to come help us out. We are very thankful for he and Mariah coming and helping us solve our little predicament. (THANK YOU!)

Donut and all, the patriot was rolling again and our hardwood was dry and ready to take home. It was a long (and cold) hour or so, but Ty was grateful to get the rest of the wood home so he could finish the floor. I will post pictures of the new floor soon!!