One room down...

We have one week until we have to be officially moved out of our old house.  Which means that no matter where we are in the home renovation process next Friday, that's just what we're going to have to deal with when we move in.  And that means that we're going to bust our asses over the next seven days to try to get as much completed as possible while also moving out of and cleaning the old house.  Never a dull (or relaxing) moment around here lately!

I realized a few days ago that I kept getting caught up on doing little things around the house that can really wait until we've moved in (for instance, painting the doorways and trim around the house), and that I needed to start focusing on finishing up the bigger projects and getting all of our crap moved over.  It's driving me crazy not to be able to post about finished projects right now, but I guess I'll just have plenty to show off later.  [My beautiful kitchen cabinets are completely done and completely awesome-looking, but I can't hang the doors yet because I don't want to get them all dirty while we're tiling!]

My big victory from last week:  we have one mostly-finished, inhabitable room!  I got the entire master bedroom painted (including the horrible yellow closet interior) and I replaced all of the baseboard molding.  And obviously, the lovely shag carpet has been magically transformed into beautiful wood floors.  I still want to paint the trim around the doors, but otherwise this is our first room makeover to show off, and I'm stoked.

Before:

After:

Month one of home ownership: success!

I've gotta say... we're pretty much rocking this whole DIY house-remodel stuff.  Josh and I are both walking around like zombies, I've gained probably ten pounds from not sleeping and constantly eating crap food, I scrub paint out of my hair every single day, I haven't sat down and watched a movie on my couch in weeks... but damn if I'm not having a blast.  I admit, the novelty of it all has worn off a little bit from a few weeks ago, but I'm definitely not tired of it yet.  There's something so rewarding about being able to see how much the house has changed and how good it's starting to look, and to know that we did it all ourselves.  And the best part of it all is that we haven't killed each other yet.

I'll put up more photos of progress soon, but I've been trying to wait until a few of the on-going projects were finished so that I could post some finished photos.  I'm just about done with the kitchen cabinet makeover (a serious undertaking, let me tell you), and we now have a real laundry room!  We've started the process of painting the whole house one room at a time, and with the help of some friends last weekend, the master bedroom is almost complete.  Josh has spent a good chunk of the last couple of weeks underneath the house in the dusty crawl space, replacing pipes and rerouting water lines for the laundry room.  We still need to fix a small gas leak and patch up the walls in the laundry room, but then hopefully within the next few days we can get onto the fun of tiling the floors!

I'm pretty sure that the employees at Lowe's, Home Depot, and Ace are all starting to recognize us.  Ask me what aisle something is located on in any of those stores-- I could probably tell you.  We've been moving carloads of stuff to the new house every day in an attempt to start emptying out the old place.  It's slow-going, but I'll be very happy to not have the stress of moving all of our stuff at once later in the month.  So, things are going well.  Our new house is going to kick ass when we're done with it.

Last night, Albuquerque got the first good rain we've had in many months... Josh and I took a break from patching and painting walls and sat on our new front porch, drinking margaritas and watching the rain.  I'm excited for many more nights just like that in our new house... maybe only minus the paint splatters and splinters and residual sulfur smells from seeking out that pesky gas leak.

Step 1: Obtain floor tiles.

Ever since moving to the Southwest ten years ago (wow, I've been here for ten years!), I have been completely in love with the aesthetic of Southwestern adobe homes.  I love the exposed wood, the combination of bright and earthy colors, the rounded edges, the patterns... all of it.  One of my favorite aspects of this kind of home design is definitely all of the tile.  Tile floors, tile walls, tile backsplashes- I love it all!

When we realized that a good portion of our new house was not going to have exposed wood floors like the front rooms do, my mind immediately jumped to our tiling options.  Without ever having to think it over at all, I knew that I wanted Saltillo tile floors.  We did our research and talked to a few people about our options, and we decided on a plan.

Our plan looks a little bit like this:

(I took this photo of a floor at the El Cordova Hotel on Coronado Island, CA.)

This weekend Josh and I went to a tile store in Old Town Albuquerque and purchased 300 square feet of Saltillo tile (that's all the truck would hold- we'll go back for more as we need it), and twenty accent tiles.

We will alternate the accents between the printed tile and the blue tiles, but otherwise we hope to have our floors look like the pattern pictured above.  We'll probably do something a little different for the den and the office, but these tiles are for the kitchen, laundry room, and bathrooms.  One step at a time here, people.  I'm pretty sure it's going to be amazing.

We're going to do all of the tiling ourselves.  All 900 square feet of it!  It'll probably take a while.  I don't know when I'll be able to post photos of the final result, but I was too excited not to say something about it now.  I am in love with these tiles and cannot wait to see how our floors turn out.  As soon as Josh finishes working on the pipes and vents for our new laundry room and patches up the floor, we'll be able to start laying the tile.  And once the tile is down, we can actually move in!

Wood floors!

We officially have newly-refinished, gorgeous wood floors in our new house!  This was the first big renovation job on our list, so it's great to have it complete now... and I'm thrilled with how it turned out!  We are trying to do most all of the work on the house ourselves, but we decided that refinishing the wood floors was something that we were willing to hire someone else to do.  I don't doubt that we could have done it ourselves, but I know that having a professional do the work has definitely given us better end results and probably saved us a bit of stress as well.

To recap:  This is what our floors looked like when we bought the house.

This is what our floors looked like after we pulled up the carpet:

This is what the floors looked like after Mr. Floorman sanded them down:

And THIS is what our floors look like now!

I absolutely love all the natural colors that came out in the wood after they were refinished.  The floor guys didn't use any color staining at all, so I was originally worried that the floors would turn out lighter in color than I really wanted, but I still can't even believe how awesome the color variation in these old oak boards is!  Better than I had hoped for, by far.
SO HAPPY.