New Floors, Doors, Trim, Paint

The dust if finally settling - literally!  We had a bit of a renovation occur in our downstairs.  After 8 years, we finally got new floors, new interior doors, trim, and Matt re-painted to cap it all off.  Our house is pretty small, so that is a transformation.  For those of you that have been here, it looks totally different.  And I think it turned out pretty good! 

In true "Marie" form, I was pretty grouchy and pessimistic throughout the whole experience.  Poor Matt!  Matt, his nephew and brother did all of the demo.  And Matt did all of the pre-painting of trim and doors.  We found the flooring at Sam's Club, rather surprisingly.  It's two different types of laminate.  We had laminate throughout our downstairs before, but it was poorly installed and worn.  We hired a contractor to install it, since neither of us have that skill set.  Although we could have figured it out, it probably would have taken us triple the time and whole lot of frustration.  My role was cleaning everything out.  That turned out to be much more work than it sounds.  We have a LOT of stuff, and so things had to be re-organized in order to fit it somewhere during the construction period.  You would be surprised how hard it is to move everything out of your kitchen, living room, bathroom and laundry room.  So insert grouchiness.  At one point in the midst of the chaos, I grumbled to Matt that if I had known it was going to be this painful, I would have never agreed to get new floors.  Poor Matt.  He was a trooper, and he even decided while everything was out of the house to re-paint the living room and the laundry room.  He was trying hard to make it less painful for me.  He even tried to organize things before I got home from work to lessen my stress.  So awesome!  I can't believe how accustomed I had gotten to doors that didn't close and the paint-peeling trim and doors!