New stuff underfoot!

While mopping the floor yesterday, I realized that I never posted about our new floors!  Our home was a foreclosure, and before putting it on the market, the bank painted the entire house a lovely peachy beige and installed new beige carpet throughout the whole house.  Sadly, our dogs completely trashed the carpet in a matter of months.  Whether it was the adjustment to a new space, the scent of the previous owners' dogs coming from the sub-floor, or the fact that our 8 year old dogs are just un-potty-trained assholes, the peed on the carpet.  A lot.  And you can only clean giant puddles of dog pee out of the carpet so many times before it's just ... done.  

I'd been researching flooring options for quite some time and trying to decide how to get several hundred square feet of flooring for practically pennies.  We considered painting or staining the sub-floor, and did quite a bit of experimenting with ideas.  Ultimately, we needed to find out what kind of shape the floor was in before we made any decisions.  And one day I decided that I couldn't live one more day with the nasty carpet and we ripped that crap outta there.  Turns out, the sub-floor was in just so-so shape.  Not terrible, but not great.  

I pondered a little more and one day stumbled upon a really great sale at Lumber Liquidators.  A 6mm laminate flooring called Donar Oak for $0.29 per square foot. It was a really pretty, albeit cheap, laminate flooring.   I tried to place an order, but they were all sold out.  Womp Womp.  I called the store on the off chance that they had some in stock and the awesome store manager told me that they run sales like fairly often and let me know when to check the website for another sale.  

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A few weeks later, I found an even better sale than the first one -- $0.19 per square foot for a 6mm laminate called Black Forest Oak.  It wasn't as pretty as the Donar Oak, but it was CHEAP.  So I ordered enough for the family room and living/dining room and then waited for awhile -- a few weeks, to be exact. The people at Lumber Liquidators were wonderful and kept me updated throughout my waiting period.  Eventually, I got a call from my local Lumber Liquidators store manager informing me that they were still waiting for half of my order to arrive (it looks like they are out of the Black Forest Oak still/again), but that they had enough stock of the Donar Oak (my original choice) to fill my whole order.  Ummmm, OK!!  

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We picked it up from the store that day and also picked up some Blue Hawk underlayment from Lowe's.  We didn't want to go with anything super expensive because BUDGET or anything super cheap because KIDS and DOGS and NOISE.  Brian and his friend got it all installed in a weekend.  It was very easy and would have been possible to get done in a day had they not had 3 little helpers!  Those helpers are super cute though, so they rolled with it.  (I didn't document their process because there are a million tutorials out there for laminate flooring installation.  Shanty 2 Chic did a pretty good one that you can find here.)

We are loving, loving, LOVING the floor.  It's beautiful, cleans easily, and hides dust and dirt very well between vacuum sessions.  And it was cheap!  With 3 little boys and 3 dogs, I'd rather something cheap get ruined than something expensive.  We won't always have 3 dogs and eventually those little boys will grow into big boys and if the floors are shot, I'll consider it money well spent.  The underlayment we chose has been lovely so far and we're happy with the choice.  It's not echo-ey or hollow sounding or anything.  

In case you're wondering about the budget breakdown...

9 Boxes (approx 600 sq ft) Donar Oak Laminate Flooring - $120.71

6 Rolls Underlayment - $284.94

Grand Total - $405.65 

That's roughly $0.68 per square foot!  Not half bad, if you ask me, especially since it barely took 8 hours worth of work.  I think that prepping and painting/staining both rooms would have taken well over double that amount of time, and most likely for not much cheaper.  So I'm pretty happy with our results!  

We haven't installed new baseboards yet, but I'm leaning toward a nice, simply, high baseboard like in the photo above.  I like to chew on things for awhile before I pull the trigger, so this piece is sitting in the family room so I can decide if I like the feel of it.  In the mean time, we're lovin' the floors!

**For the record, Lumber Liquidators and Lowe's have no idea who I am.  Just passing along info on products I'm diggin'.  

Gray walls and a coconut monkey.

The living room/dining room walls are finished and I could not be happier with my color choice.

It is the perfect neutral gray.  I took my custom-mixed swatch to Sherwin-Williams to either see if I could find something that was close or to have them custom-mix some paint.  

It turned out that SW 7649 Silverplate was pretty much the same.  So I took home 2 gallons and got to work ... a week later.  Because, life.  

I just love love love it.

You can still see a bit of peachy-beige peeking out above the base-molding, The carpet is going to be ripped out and we'll do something with the floors, so because we'll have to remove the molding anyway, I just painted almost down to it.  

 

It's insanely refreshing to have one tiny corner of the house looking slightly put-together!   Curtains, furniture, and even a few fall decorations make it feel so much more like home.

Especially the coconut monkey.  He knocks it all outta the park.  

Finding the perfect shade of gray.

I'll start out by saying this:

I am a color person. 

I get it from my mother, who's dream job would be to name colors all day long.  Except that she has no vision when it comes to a color in a room.  Naming is pretty much where it ends for her.  I, on the other hand, could spend hours in Sherwin-Williams, touching all of the rainbow of swatches and deciding on the very perfect color for each and every room in my house.  

In the past, I have always spent the most of my time combing over swatches, choosing a sample or two to take home and paint onto the wall, and going from there.  Simple.  Easy.  

But my vision for a light gray for the living and dining room has proven ... difficult.  There are currently 12 shades of gray on the walls in that room.  Brian wanted me to keep adding to it as a nod to the book title.  But the overwhelming amount of options is already making me want to poke out my eyeballs.  

Admittedly, my biggest mistake was painting all of the samples over the peachy-beige on the walls instead of priming it first.  Lesson definitely learned.  Trying the shades on several walls was very helpful, as was studying all of the samples during various times of day.  Another helpful step?  Pouring over blog entries on choosing the perfect gray, like these from Ask Anna, Love, Pomegranate House, Stacy Risenmay,Pretty Handy Girl, Thistlewood Farms, and this one from Emily Henderson is helpful and hysterical.  

I tried a few shades from Sherwin-Williams and a few from Lowes.  All seemed like the perfect one on the paint chips, but once I got them onto the wall, while pretty, they just weren't what I was looking for.  When they seemed too light, too blue, too green, too beige, too purple ... I started mixing.  

To achieve shades that were darker/lighter/less blue/less green/etc, I used Valspar Summer Sparrow, Valspar Montpelier Ashlar Gray, and Valspar Java.  

I finally landed on Silverpointe or a slightly darker, less blue version of Silverpointe that I mixed myself.  While I LOVE Silverpointe, the final decision was for the custom mix.  Silverpointe will definitely end up somewhere else in our house, but I wanted something a tiny bit warmer for this room.  

I painted a little bit on the back of another paint swatch and will take it to Sherwin-Williams to see if I can find something similar or if they can work their color-matching magic.  

I have never in my life had such a hard time choosing a paint color!  But hopefully I'll be able to get some paint on the walls today!