The Home Stretch

Our dining and living room project is almost finished- well, the renovation part at least! Here are some photos of the hard work LeGrande put in over these past 2 weeks.

The hardest (physically) part was sanding off the old stain and polyurethane from years ago with this sander we rented from Home Depot. Thankfully the vacuum bag on the sander caught most of the sanding dust, which has helped me keep the house clean. It's hard work keeping up with the dust! LeGrande's dad helped out immensely! Thanks, Pawpaw!

After cleaning up from the sanding, it was time to put in a light fixture into the dining room and a new fan and light in the living room. Both rooms are fully painted and look great! We bought the light fixture at Home Depot about 2 years ago after admiring it for weeks and then catching it on sale for 75% off! It was worth the wait and the price!

The next thing LeGrande did was to stain the newly sanded floors. The stain is a red oak and matches the stain on the hardwoods in the rest of our house. Finally, all of the floors in our house have a uniform look! It's so pretty!

After Christmas, LeGrande will work hard to polyurethane the floors. This is a 4 day project. You paint a layer of polyurethane on, wait for it to dry, then scratch it up with steel wool and wipe it down with mineral spirits before painting on another layer of the polyurethane. As you can imagine, the fumes from the polyurethane and the mineral spirits are pretty strong, and because it is winter and the house can't be opened up to air out, the fumes won't have many places to go. My OB has said that this is unsafe for our unborn baby and that I have to stay out of the house until he is done...so on Monday the 29th, I'll head to Charlotte to hang out with my parents until I get the okay to come home. I think we'll have a fun few days in Charlotte, and hopefully I'll be back home on New Year's to celebrate with my sweetie! I'm so proud of the hard work he has done and how beautiful our house looks!

When I get home, we can put up the curtain rods and curtains. I bought the curtains at the Pottery Barn outlet 18 months ago after finding the ones we'd drooled over in the catalog for a mere $30 a panel, as opposed to the catalog price of $179 a panel, yikes!!! I was thrilled!!! We can also begin moving furniture back into the newly renovated rooms! I can't wait-right now we have an antique dish cabinet and extra chair in our bedroom, a dining table, coffee table, and a bunch of plants in the guest room, dining room chairs in the attic, more plants in the den, and other items scattered throughout our small house. Add that to the 4 laundry racks that are here and there since we don't have a dryer. Aughh! It can make a nesting pregnant woman a bit crazy but I try to remember that this has to be done before we can start work on a nursery, so it's all part of the process. It's been a fun one to watch and cheer on!