Author: Susan

When we bought the house, all three of our bedrooms had the same stained, unravelling Berber carpet that we’d had replaced in the family room last winter. I’m not sure when it was put in – it seems slightly unlikely that it dated all the way back to the family room addition in the mid-eighties, but not impossible given its condition? The previous owners had all of the carpets cleaned professionally, which really didn’t make much of a dent, and then we did our best to cover the worst of the stains with furniture and ignore the rest. Once we knew that everything was going to be moved around for the baby, though, it didn’t take us very long to start talking about using that opportunity to replace the bedroom carpet as well. We decided to go with the same carpet we installed in the family room, just different colors.

It’s hard to photograph expanses of horrible beige berber, but here’s a sample before photo:

The guys showed up, took out all of our old carpet, and revealed this linoleum loveliness underneath:

(Who puts linoleum in a bedroom??) Glad that we covered that right back up. 🙂 Kevin took advantage of the exposed subfloors/linoleum to fix a bunch of loud squeaks, especially in our room and the baby’s room. It makes such a difference to have silence while walking.

While the guys were working, we had an unexpected visitor fly in through the open front door:

He was quite determined to get back outside through the (unopenable) living room windows, but we managed to coax him off his perch and out the door pretty quickly, and without a mess. The carpet guys seemed amused by our efforts.

The new carpet looks amazing, and we love the colors we ended up with. Here’s our new shared office – I really just love the way that this one works with the pink walls.

We have the guest bed and trundle moved back in, and have started assembling our new desks. The closet is where we’ll store most of what’s now in the family room once we weed it down a bit, and my guess is that it will be a work in progress for a week or two.

Here’s the baby’s room, with its pretty new carpet and paint:

The paint color looks yellow in the mornings, green at night, and varies remarkably in brightness during the day depending on the light. There’s one part of the day that seems to bring out a color that I can only describe as “lime yogurt” and that I’m not that fond of, but other than that one shade we’re both quite pleased with it. Between the north-west exposure and the fact that the garage blocks almost all direct light, we worried about finding a color that would have some saturation without making the room too dark. I like the end result. Here’s the view looking from the window to the closet:

(Unfortunately the new carpet and pad are higher than the old, so we’re going to have to remove most of the doors, sand and paint the bottoms, and rehang them. Ugh. Nothing like unanticipated extra steps.)

And we chose a medium blue carpet for our room:

I was afraid that the new carpet color wouldn’t work with the existing wall color, but I’m actually a huge fan. We were both especially impressed with the work they did in the closet, installing around all of the parts of the built-in and modular shelving. (This photo came out pretty yellow, so the carpet looks greyer than in reality).

Here’s the view from the door with all of the furniture back in…

… including the baby’s bassinet!! Very exciting to see that waiting for his arrival!

Such a huge improvement!

We had to move everything out of the three bedrooms so that the new carpets could be installed, which included emptying the closets of the front bedrooms, since the Closet Maid shelving in there has posts which rest on the floor. While it doesn’t look like it to me when everything is packed away in its spot, it appears that we have a LOT of stuff. And all of those books aren’t light. Luckily we started clearing things out early last week, because between Kevin’s shoulder and my size/shape/endurance, we needed lots of breaks. Exhausting, but at least we were laughing at ourselves together – it’s nice to both be able to see the humour in that sort of situation.

Now everything is sitting in the living room and family room. The view of the living room from the front door and bedroom hallway:

And looking towards the dining area:

And the view of the family room from the doorway (you can see about 2/3 of the stuff here, the rest didn’t fit in the shot).

We moved the bed out of our room the night before the installation and just left the mattress to sleep on, which lent an odd/happy feeling of camping out to the whole affair. The only drawback was that my current elegance getting out of bed is magnified when I’m also trying to get up from the floor. I’d definitely say I’m past the “cute” stage of pregnancy.

Like all projects, this one seems to be a case of two steps forward, one back. We found that one of the screws for our bed was stripped to the point of uselessness. The closest match at the hardware store was about a sixteenth of an inch too wide for the bracket. We thought the store we’d bought it from (Underhills) had closed last fall, but it turns out the son has reopened a new version of it so we took a field trip up to Lynnwood after work to get more screws. (We were both so happy to know that store is still around in a new incarnation – love the furniture and the customer service.) Now we at least have one of the three bedrooms back in standard condition.