What we really like to do is to start some kind of big project that absolutely has to be done by a certain, not very far away, time. Like re-doing a guest bath right before a bunch of people arrive for Christmas. Or tearing down our old deck right before we go out of town for two months on a summer road trip. Or, similarly, ripping apart Milo and Gus’s room a few weeks before we go out of town for spring break and have house sitters coming to stay.

Honestly, even though it’s stressful, we work really well with deadlines like this, so I don’t mind all that much. I mean, we did it to ourselves, so if I did mind, I’d have no one else to blame anyway. Might as well not mind.

To review, we’re taking Milo and Gus’s room from a forest oasis:

To a more modern and more grown-up sort of room, with loft beds that leave room for the desks they both want:

 

I won’t show you what my downstairs looks like right now: picture garbage bags full of old carpet waiting for a scheduled trash pickup, disassembled beds and mattresses waiting for someone from Craigslist to come get them (any minute now, I hope!)….you get the idea.

But here’s what Milo and Gus’s actual room is looking like:

Painted! Underlayment for floors down! Bamboo: acclimating!

Milo and Gus are sleeping in the basement for the time being, in case you were wondering.

Painting was our first step after emptying out the room. This is Benjamin Moore’s Old Navy in a matte finish. I’m really pleased with the color; I’m always a big fan of navy, and I feel like this is a little bolder and more modern than the moodier Hale Navy we have in the den:

Or the navy/teal Newburg Green we have in our bedroom and and in the basement:

I could happily go around painting every room in my house a slightly different dark blue, I think.

It took a coat of primer plus two coats of paint (not to mention stripping the wall mural off), so just getting this far was a substantial task.

But we didn’t stop there! Because we hate carpet! So we pulled it all up! Goodbye evil carpet!

Honestly, if we’d found a plywood subfloor under there I’d have been tempted to just slap some paint down on it and call it good until we could afford to replace all the carpet upstairs….but it was OSB (which is what we expected, since that’s what was under the carpet in the master bathroom). Pulling up the carpet was straightforward, with no particular surprises.

Hey, what are you doing in there, Abe? That’s not your room!

There’s Gus. That’s better. Incidentally, the closets are still the same color the room was when we moved in, and we have no immediate plans to paint them. They didn’t bother me at all back when the room was green, and they’ll actually go better now. And the doors stay closed most of the time anyway.

Picking out bamboo was way harder than I expected. I thought I wanted a very light, natural bamboo color. But once I got to the store to look, I realized that the natural color of bamboo is, apparently, a lot more yellow than I wanted. I hemmed and hawed about it for quite awhile, but I just couldn’t fall in love with the lightest shades of bamboo. We considered doing engineered hardwood instead–maybe a maple or birch or hickory–but finally we decided to stick with bamboo, but go with more of a medium wood tone.

We ended up with Eco Forest’s “mocha” from Floor and Decor, in 5 inch planks–the kind that go together like a big puzzle and don’t need staples or glue. It was $2.79/square foot, which didn’t sound like much until we bought enough for the whole room: the floors with 10% or so overage, plus the (more expensive, because it’s supposed to be super quiet and that sounds heavenly) underlayment was over $800 for this one small room.

Abe is really happy about the floors because he’s not the one who paid for them.

Dave also took this opportunity to buy the table saw he’s always wanted but never really had a good excuse to buy before. Home Depot was running an in store promotion to get $75 off for signing up for a credit card, so we got the $230 saw for $155 (assuming we remember that we opened the account and don’t forget to pay the bill. Someone remind me in a few weeks, please).

So I’m still hoping we’ll be able to get all the upstairs floors done by the end of the year, but we’ll see. (There are 4 bedrooms plus our closet to do; the hallway is already wood, and the bathrooms are tile. But our bedroom and closet are HUGE). Dave did all the underlayment the other day and he’s hoping to start on the floors themselves Tuesday. And with a little luck we’ll be leaving ourselves with about a week to pull the house back together before spring break!

 

 

 

 

 

 

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