Hardwood Floors - Exposed!

We knew there were red oak floors beneath the living room and hallway carpet when we bought the house, but we were waiting to pull out the carpet until we finished the kitchen project. Well, we finally did that, so it was time to start the project. Plus, when Adam and I say we're going to do something, we generally do it. Here's the living room with the carpet.

Here's the living room with the carpet half rolled up.

If you've ever watched Flip That House, you know that uncovering hardwood floors is a gamble. You could fine mold, water damage, termites, or other problems. Fortunately, our living room floor was as good as we could have hoped for. We pulled out about 1,000 staples and a bunch of nails. Some of those were due to the fact that this was not the first carpet that had been over the wood and whoever put in the latest carpet just pounded down old staples and nails. That was quite a lot of physical labor to get those out, but Adam finished it yesterday and today we cleaned the floors and put a layer of polish on.

Here's the pre-polish floor (yes, the dining room table is currently in the kitchen and the couch is in the front hallway - we've been doing some gymnastics to get around today).

I stripped the old paint off the metal register covers (they had last been painted in place so the bottom inch was a different color, plus carpet fibers were stuck to the paint) and they are currently sitting in the garage in between coats of primer (thanks Dad for the painting advice!). All in all, a successful project that we'll be able to wrap up this week. The only negative was some deep scratches in the hallway where they had previously had a carpet transition piece. I will say that the carpet layer was obviously not considering the fact that someone would someday remove the carpet since they did things like use a utility knife to cut the carpet pad and left deep scratches around the perimeter of the room, and pounded large nails flush with the floor so that we had to damage the floor to get them out (which we decided was less ugly than a large black nailhead).

We love our yard!

This spring has been fun because we have 1) the plants that were here when we bought the house, 2) the plants we planted last year, and 3) the things we've planted so far this year. Every day we walk around the yard to see what's now blooming (and what the bunnies have eaten). Here are some of my favorite pics from the past couple weeks:

A spiderwort flower (shortly before the bunnies chewed it off)

Our friendly tulips that bloom in profusion

One of our many large jack-in-the-pulpits

A bloodroot flower (they bloom for only about 3 days, but they are gorgous)

Some Mayapple flowers. We do realize that these will take over our yard if we're not careful, but they're so cute!

Our giant rhubarb patch. It's one large regular rhubarb plant plus 4 small red rhubarb plants.

We added a berm to our back landscaping for some interest. We also planted a cherry tree, mock orange, dwarf highbush cranberry, some coreopsis, and an aster that has been chewed to almost nothing.

And finally, this is Adam building our new raised bed gardens. They are currently full of vegetables. We had a lettuce, spinach, and swiss chard salad with homemade french dressing and 2 pea pods tonight.