My Favourite Things: Monday

 

Today's topic is something that I love about my house right now.  The main thing that sold us on our current house is the location.  We don't have any neighbors behind us, so our view is a vast amount of undeveloped land that is owned by the county.  It's not unusual for us to see all kinds of wildlife on a daily basis, including the occasional coyote (although we hear those more often than we see them).  Of course, "location" isn't really a physical attribute of our house, so I am choosing something else as my blog topic today. 

There were two things that I absolutely hated about our house when we first saw it.  The first would be this atrocious wallpaper, which was in the dining room:

Seriously...  WHAT were they thinking?

The wallpaper was a relatively easy fix, so we got rid of that shortly after we moved in.  The other thing we hated just as much as the wallpaper was the PINK carpeting, which was in almost every room.  We couldn't afford to start that project until 2007, when we got a very nice tax refund which we used to purchase flooring from Nebraska Furniture Mart.  Incidentally, did you know you can barter with the sales people on flooring? Because of this, we were able to get a GREAT deal on exactly what we wanted. 

Since the pink carpet was throughout most of our house, we knew we wouldn't be able to afford to replace it all at once.  So, we chose to do the dining room, front room, entry way and hallway.  Of course, because we were installing it ourselves, it sat in the boxes for a few months before we were finally able to begin..  You know, since home improvement projects always take longer than one anticipates.  And since Esther found more wallpaper when taking up the baseboards, and refused to paint over it, so we had to strip all of that off and ended up with ugly patches where the drywall paper came off, which then required using a textured base before we could paint it.  But we won't talk about that.  :o)


Anyway...  The end result was well-worth all of our efforts, and this aspect of our house immediately became the thing I love the most about it, and still is to this day. 

The completed task, pre-clean-up.

As you can see, Gidget enjoyed being our model during this project.  ;o)

It was a major task to install this flooring ourselves, but we can take pride in the fact that we did it ourselves AND it looks great.  I'm not sure I'd tackle the task again, but I'm definitely proud of our work, and ultimately glad that we did it.  When we do get around to getting rid of the remaining pink carpet, we will most likely replace it with more modern carpet -- which will hopefully be installed by professionals!