Right this second, I’m sitting at a campground on Jekyll Island, having a glass of wine and watching Jesus Christ Superstar Live.

But just a week ago, we were frantically trying to get the floors finished in Milo and Gus’s room and put their new beds together so they could move back in and we could get the house semi-put back together before our house sitters arrived. And we did it!

I can’t begin to tell you how excited I am that we’re on the way to having no more carpet in our house. I firmly believe that Hell is carpeted.

And Dave found putting in the bamboo satisfying and relatively uncomplicated, so we’re both eager to get to the other bedrooms soon. If bamboo were free, we’d go out and get the rest right now. Well, not RIGHT now, because we’re on vacation. But maybe next week.

I talked in my last update about what a hard time we had picking out floors in here. I originally thought I wanted lighter floors, but in person the lightest bamboo looked too yellow. So we went with these “mocha” floors from Eco Forest at Floor and Decor, and I’m really, really happy with them. It could have gone either way; we could have gotten them down and still been less than enamored of the color…..this happens to me sometimes with paint colors, but I suspect it hurts a lot more when you’ve spent $800 on the thing you don’t love than $50 or 60. But now that they’re down, I genuinely love the color and am so happy we didn’t go with yellow bamboo.

Here’s how it looks next to the orange-y oak out in the hallway (and throughout the downstairs):

Hmm….it looks a lot browner in this picture than in the ones up above. I’m not sure…I guess it’s about the light hitting them more in the pictures up there. Anyway, since I had no interest in actually attempting to match the orange-y oak, I’m happy enough with how they look next to each other. We still need to put in the transition piece, as you can see.

Once we get another room or two into the process I’ll do a more thorough post about buying and installing the bamboo. I don’t think we have any really amazing insights to add to what’s already out there; we’ve done these and we’ve done tiling, and these were about a gazillion times easier. They’re the floating, snap together kind.

And then the beds! These are Stuva loft beds from Ikea, by way of Craigslist. We found someone selling two of them, which was exactly how many we needed, and we got the pair for $400. Which is how much they sell for each at Ikea, so we were pleased with that.

They’ve been sleeping on them for almost a week now. First impression: I’m amazed at how much bigger the room seems now:

I guess it makes sense; the whole point of loft beds is that they free up floor space by putting the beds up high. But we actually had loft beds in here before and it felt very crowded. I think putting them in an L shape like this is key. When we had two parallel to each other, all you saw was loft bed as soon as you opened the door. Like this, there’s nothing blocking the doorway, and they have this big area that we’re planning to turn into a reading corner:

It makes kind of a little private nook in the desk area for Milo (he’s the bed against the window wall), while still leaving plenty of room for Gus to get to the wardrobe on the end of the bed.

Speaking of which….there’s a ridiculous amount of storage in these beds.

Which is lovely. I’m wanting a really streamlined kind of look in here with as much clutter as possible hidden away. It’s a fairly small space for two tween/teen boys to share, so I’m all about anything we can do to make things feel more open.

Concerns we had about the loft beds:

*low ceilings/tall kids: we only have 8 foot ceilings, so some loft beds just wouldn’t work in here. But these are fine. Milo is pushing up against 6 foot tall, and he can sit up in the bed just fine.

*Rory the terrier can’t get up in the beds. Actually, we didn’t think about this until it was too late. Rory has slept with Milo just about every night since we first brought him home 5 1/2 years ago. He is not at all happy about not being able to get up into Milo’s bed anymore. We tried a dog bed underneath, but he’s not  having it. So we’re experimenting with letting him up there. Our worry is that he’ll get too excited about breakfast in the morning (which happens before Milo and Gus get up) and try to jump down. But so far he is being appropriately cautious and waiting until Dave lifts him down.

*covering up a window. There’s really no way to have loft beds in here without covering up a window. But I googled and it seems like people do this pretty regularly with loft and bunk beds. And it means that Milo has a window right above his desk, so the light still gets through. And now that they’re in there, it doesn’t bother me at all and the room still seems plenty bright. We’ll probably leave the uncovered window with just the blinds and no curtain to maximize the light.

Even if Rory is not so sure about the new arrangement, Athena the cat approves:

So that’s what we’ve got for now! Still to come: art for the walls, some kind of seating for the reading area, lighting for the desk areas and probably for the lofted areas, a rug (I’m glad I didn’t buy one before the beds were in here, because now I’m thinking a smaller rug than I originally had planned), maybe some kind of small shelves next to their beds to hold books, a clock, etc., maybe white boards or bulletin boards above the desks for artwork and whatnot.

But this week: beach!