CARPET!!!

WOW!  So, carpet has been a long time coming in our house.  It was an incredibly long process, and I’m gonna make you relive it with me if you want to see the pics of the new stuff!  Or, I guess you could just scroll to the bottom to see the finished product… but where’s the fun in that?! :)

We started in July by going to Home Depot and picking out some carpet.  We scheduled a measurement (it took them 2 weeks to even get to our house to measure!!), and then they gave us a bid… which was considerably more than we had planned on!  So, we stalled… and talked (ad nauseum, according to Josh)… and decided to look at some different carpet.  So we were off to Lowe’s.  We found a good carpet that came with a premium pad for considerably less than what we found at Home Depot.  And they work with a local installer, which we liked.  So we ordered the carpet, it came mid/end of September, and we picked our first free weekend, which was last weekend!  We decided to remove the old carpet ourselves, since it would cost about $400 to have it removed, and we could do it ourselves and have the city pick it up for free.  So last week we packed up all of our extra stuff.  The house looked like this:

 And there’s a refresher on what our old, grey carpet looked like, too!  Then, Thursday evening, our wonderful friends and family came over and helped us move all of our furniture out.  Dad loaned us a box trailer (he just parked it in our driveway all weekend), and everything except for the TV in the bedroom went into it (or the garage).  We spent the next couple of days sleeping on air mattresses and having to go to the garage to get our clothes (made us think twice about what we needed, ‘cause nobody wanted to make a second trip for socks!).  It was funny, because we just kind of camped out in our bedroom, since it still had the TV…

Our camp… isn’t my family cute? :)

Saturday we ran to Walmart for carpet removal necessities (utility knives, duct tape, masks, goggles, gloves… of which we only used the knives and the tape, but oh well).  We got into a rhythm pretty quickly: I cut and rolled the carpet and pad in 3-4 foot strips, taped it, and carried it out to the garage.  Josh went around the perimeter of the room and used a hammer and prybar to take off the tack strips.  It was hard work, but not difficult!  We started in the blue room, since we use it the least…

It was kinda gross how much dirt was underneath the carpet and pad… a look at our dirt pile in the living room… 

We did the two front bedrooms, then the living room, and left our bedroom for last, since the TV was still hooked up, and that was about the only good way to keep Laney from running amok in the house!  Our bedroom started to look a little rough by the time we wanted to get started on it…

About the time we were done with all of the rooms besides our’s, it was time for a nap for the girls, so we set them up in their room on a comforter, and we took a break for lunch so they could fall asleep without the pounding hammer.  They looked pretty cute in there… I am so blessed to have such flexible sleepers!

After lunch, Josh & I tackled the bedroom, and finally finished, after about 6 hours of work.  We were left with this pile of carpet in the garage:

And a house with floors like this:

We lived on those floors, with air mattresses and camp chairs, all day Sunday, which was kind of a rough day.  We just couldn’t find anything, and the floors were cold and dirty, and we’d been sleeping on air mattresses since Thursday night… everyone was a little cranky!  But we made it through to Monday morning, when the girls and I headed out and Josh stayed home to watch.  I must admit, I was pretty jealous that he got to stay home, I really wanted to.  But, he did send me some pics throughout the day, and I was quite excited to see progress being made!

Pad first… we got a pad with a moisture barrier, since our house is just on a concrete slab…

And then I was so excited to see actual carpet laid out!!

Shortly after I got home around 5:30, the carpet was all finished!  So I immediately ran around and took pictures of all of the rooms… So excited!!

Love how tiny Audrey looks in this one!

So, anyway, Monday night we had all of those same wonderful friends & family came over to help us move all of our furniture back into our house!  We’ve spent the last week organizing and unpacking all the stuff we packed, and our house finally looks back to normal! 

We absolutely LOVE it!!