Brown Paper

 It was quite an adventure. We basically packed up our house, room by room, moved furniture, and used just about every ounce of creativity, patience (most of which ran out), and more money, time and effort than expected. We're finally done. For now. 

We slept in our dining room for days. We ate wherever we could find space. We ran up and down stairs just to get things out of the fridge. We cooked just about every meal in crockpots for close to a week. We even shipped our kids to Gramma and Papa's house for a night because there was very limited access to our one and only bathroom. 

We ripped up nasty, disintegrating carpet. We pulverized the breakfast bar separating our kitchen and dining room. We tore up underlayment with grooves and bonded-to-it  chipped and scratched up linoleum. We hammered and glued and polyurethaned. 

We laughed. We cried. OK, I cried. We yelled, we apologized, we thanked, we accepted help, we thanked some more, we ran away. OK again, I ran away, briefly, with kids, to my parents' house due to fumes and migraines and stress. We learned a lot about the process, about ourselves, and about each other. 

The result? One continuous type of flooring throughout the main part of our house. Brown paper flooring, to be exact. Flooring that is much more handicapped accessible than ancient carpet and broken and missing stick-on vinyl tiles on top of linoleum. In addition,we now have a much more open kitchen and dining room area - a space that works much better for my family. It took much more work and a lot more money than I'd anticipated, but it still cost a fraction of the alternatives and will meet our needs for now.  

Now that that's done, I can barely wait to patch walls, paint, and then tackle the bathroom floor. But that will have to wait - we have a basement bedroom to work on next. It should be interesting, the budget having been mostly eaten up by the floor renovations, but we'll figure out some creative solutions to make it work.