new floors!

the new hardwood in the living room

a sample pic of the new carpet in the office

for all the pics, click here

after much debate, budgeting, shopping, haggling and comparing, matt and i finally decided to get new floors in our house. we knew this would be no small undertaking, considering the small size of our house and how much stuff we have in it, but we pushed forward and finally had new floors installed on september 4th and 5th. this is partly the reason my blog updates have been slow...we were without a computer for a while, and our house was in *major* disarray for even longer. on top of all that, our normal work schedules continued, meaning we had to fit in all the moving and such around our typical routines.
we started preparing wednesday after i got off work from the previous night. the hardwood in the living room was scheduled to be installed first, so i had to empty the bookcase and entertainment center and move all the "little" furniture so as not to slow down the install process. the hardwood was installed thursday morning, done by that afternoon around 2pm, and we absolutely love it! even matt, who was skeptical about the big purchase has agreed that the improvement must have added some major value to the house.
but our work wasn't done, i had a mandatory forensics class the next morning at work, and the installers for the upstairs carpet were to arrive shortly after my class got out. so thursday night, instead of enjoying our new, lovely floors, we packed up most of what we could from the upstairs (including all of matt's library, sheets, lamps, files from the cabinets, shoes, clothes, etc.) and covered our new hardwood with old sheets to protect it from all our boxes of "stuff." the installers arrived about 45 minutes after i returned from work and immediately started pulling up our dingy old carpet and placing the new carpet. again, we were thrilled with the results.
of course, being the OCD-type person i am, i convinced my husband that there was no need to move *all* that stuff back upstairs when we could easily sort through it while it was all out in the open and get rid of some of the unneccesaries. in doing this, it took me approx. 14 straight hours of sorting, filing, purging, boxing and cleaning to get everything i wanted back upstairs -- in order -- and everything i didn't out to the garage for donation. in the end, i'm completely satisfied...and of course, i don't miss those subway paycheck stubs from 2000 one bit!
lexi is probably the only one not impressed with the floors, since they have greatly decreased her traction, and greatly increased her need for nail trimmings....poor girl.

here is a video of poor lex, the first time she got to experience the new floors. notice how she dashes for the kitchen as soon as she's able to: