P R E T T Y C L O S E

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its been a tough few days around the living/dining room...the floors have been sanded, stain samples applied labored over and chosen (all while i live at a hotel with our 2 cats for 4 nights!), and final coating applied. 
here's a pic of the stain without it's finish coat of water based poly. the stain's been tough. we always had a vision of a gray wood floor...but the selection of gray stain is shockingly limited. hello? we really only had one gray to choose from but looked at some naturals and browns as well. so we took a chance on the one and only gray...it looks quite different in different light...blue in the evening, greenish at night and slightly more gray during the day. i guess the 'southern yellow pine-ness' is really showing through. plus our floors are so old (over 100 years) and the grain and knots so dense that it's not really taking the color as much as we'd like. i think under normal circumstances we'd be flipping out, but i guess this being kind of a rush job (because of a baby on the way and 30 people in my house for the shower in a month) makes for a more accommodating and relaxed perspective.
stay tuned for more....

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O N T O T H E N E X T

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now that the door's done and we'll have a little one crawling around soon enough, we're getting a jump on having our living room floors redone. basically the living room is our last project...on the list is to have the walls redone (pulling all the plaster down and re-sheetrocking), all the decorative mouldings redone, the floors, built-ins and bookcases built around the fireplace bump out, and finally all the windows replaced on the front of the house. this is really the hold-up since the windows will probably cost about 12,000. but they really need to be replaced before having all the molding done around them (and the current windows are garbage).
currently the floors are an absolute disaster..with entire strips of coating peeling up, boards missing, damage where walls were removed but the floors were never fixed under them, and just the general look of them is pretty horrible. we're hoping to go with a gray stain which i think is pretty unique...actually there aren't even many gray stains even available. fingers crossed!

BEFORE: horrible, embarrassing, disgusting

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N E W A D D I T I O N

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while away on our vacation we stopped in this cute shop in providence...and picked up this awesome yellow squirrel. he's diggin' his new home in the yard!

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F R O N T D O O R . . . . D O N E !

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well the project that ate the summer of 2013 is finally done! what an ordeal! a bit of an anticlimactic finale but glad to be done with this project. it turned out to be way more than we bargained for even with the 'help' of a way overpriced carpenter...who really didn't do much expect talk and spend too much time making excuses. it's done!!

 

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