I think you can always tell when we get excited because we post about a million pictures. Here’s another one of those instances. It was a beautiful warm winter Saturday (forecast said 70F?) in the middle of January.

“Provincial” stained living room and dining room.

Another living room view.

The new oak kitchen floor stained – definitely makes the color look different than the oak living and dining room. Makes us wonder if it is the aged oak that makes it look different, or if it isn’t actually oak afterall?

Stained back bedroom.

Stained middle bedroom (and office).

Stained dining room (and living room).

Happy homeowner examining the nicely re-done floor.

Our second storage facility while they’re re-doing the floors – the laundry room.

Working on scraping the paint off the other side of the bathroom door. Since it was such a gorgeous day we were able to do it outside (not that we had much of a choice). Which was nice anyway…no dust in the house!

Patrick was working with our newly purchased heat gun. He was very happy with how it worked out.

Close-up of the heat gun working it’s magic.

And our last project for this warm January Saturday: re-placing the mailbox. “Re-placing” as in we got a complaint letter from the Post Office informing us that they would not deliver any mail unless we placed the mailbox by the street. We thought we were smart when we originally placed the mailbox next to the porch like ALL the other neighbors did. I guess they were grandfathered in and we had to change it. Oh well, at least this time we actually got it in straight! Hahaha.

The floor sanding was started yesterday. When we visited today they were finishing off sanding and removing dirt. They were also in the procress of trying to move some items into the back laundry area (since it wouldn’t get sanded and refinished). Patrick and I were worried our large range would not fit through the relatively narrow doors into the kitchen. They struggled with it for a short while but got it through (to our joy). Interestingly something we never considered was the corner kitchen cabinet. It just would not fit through the door! Finally Patrick’s suggestion to take it through the back door proved to be the solution – after moving all the cabinets that had been blocking the door, and taking the door off the hinges! It was all quite a challenge, but we’re glad they got it in. The door from the laundry to the kitchen is wider and should be no problem – we’re just glad we got it into the area finally!

Beautifully sanded down back bedroom. Look how nice it looks!

Also the nice looking middle bedroom. The sanding makes the rooms feel so much different for some reason.

The dining room – the floors almost look new.

Even the hidden away hallway get’s a make-over.

Since the bathroom was one of the few places without wooden floors it is serving as a storage facility.

Since it is dark and we can’t walk on the floors anyway we decided to wait until tomorrow morning and daylight to visit the house again. We wanted to see the stained floors, but there didn’t seem much point tonight. I’ll post pics tomorrow of what they’ll look like – I hope they’ll look good! :)

The look says it all: not happy. Initially we liked a sconce from Rejuvenation, but decided for this one from Restoration Hardware instead, not only because we liked it, but also because of the price tag difference. Unfortunately the sconce has given us some major headaches. There’s more to the story, but let’s just put it at: this is the third sconce and it still has a fault.

After floor sanding has started at the house we were comparing wood stains in the middle bedroom. The bedrooms and hallway are made of pine (cheaper back then), and the entertaining rooms (dining room, living room and front bedroom, formerly a study/reading room?) have oak floors (more expensive back then). I’m not sure what our kitchen was, but we have replaced it with oak (today’s cheaper material).

Comparing stains on the dining room oak floor. This has been one of the hardest decisions! It’s one thing to paint a wall and decide you don’t like it and just paint over it. It’s a whole different ballgame when you’re paying big bucks to sand your entire house and have it restained. It’s one big decision that you better not regret later.

After difficult deliberations we have decided to go for a medium brown stain called “Provincial.” We hope it will be a nice contrast against light colored walls.

In addition the walls have been sanded down one last time, which means we’ll start priming this weekend! At least once the stain has dried from doing the floors.

One small step for a man; one giant leap for mankind…ok, well maybe not entirely, but it sure feels like it. The bathtub is finally looking good – the level shows it’s straight and everything. So the bathroom finally appears to be where it was supposed to be a month ago!

We are now secured and armed!

Our pretty new laundry room door. Though after installation we already found our brand new door handles with a big fat scratch, along with some other issues that we were not happy with. The plan is to stain the door at some point.

You guessed it – more paint scraping!

Patrick looking awfully pathetic while scraping paint from the bathroom built-in. And yes, he actually was scraping with both of those at the same time for a while.

And in other good news: Our range and dishwasher have been delivered!

In bad news: Our contractor seems to have gone AWOL.

Not that anyone is actually reading our website, but sorry if it’s starting to get boring with all the paint scraping. I think it’s just a way to keep track for myself what happens on certain days. So sorry if some of it doesn’t bring much exciting or drastic change news.