Home Improvement is a Pain!

I am only 33 years old and yet I feel as if I've been doing home improvement projects all my life! I'm sure it has something to do with the fact that we are now on our second home and they have both been older homes. After the first one I said I'd never buy an old house again and here we are! So our latest project in the house we are in now was to remove the carpet in the family room. It's a fairly large room - 20x20 and the carpet had to go. It was nasty and I just couldn't deal with it any longer. My husband thought that we could just rip up the carpet, strip the floor and then stain it and put a sealant on it. We looked at pictures, etc and it looked like a nice solution that wouldn't cost us a fortune.

So Thursday evening we decide to tear up the carpet. It didn't take us long at all to get it up. Under it was cement because the room had been added on. It must have either been a garage or a carport before. It didn't look too bad so I was pretty excited to get started. Well, we went to strip it we realized that it wasn't going to work. The glue and all the other stuff (not sure what it was exactly) would not come up. So, here we are with a ripped up carpet and no idea what to do next. My husband tells me that the stain won't work but we can paint it. I wasn't really sure about this but with no other options we headed to Lowes to pick out paint. I'm sure most people are wondering why we didn't just put new carpet down or choose other flooring. I was trying to do something relatively inexpensive. I didn't really want to invest the money in a new floor right now.

Saturday we ended up at Lowes and I just decided that I wasn't going to be happy with any paint. I wasn't sure how it would look, but I didn't want to waste the time and money on something I was pretty sure I wasn't going to be happy with. I knew that we couldn't leave the room the way it was. It was basically like having all your living room furniture in a garage. We started looking around and I was just not happy. Nothing looked like what I wanted, even though I wasn't sure what I even wanted. Finally we decided to put laminate flooring down. I still was undecided as we brought it home and started unloading it.

One day later and I must admit it looks great! My living room looks awesome. That floor did so much for that room. Now it just needs a bit of paint! Even though we spent a lot more time and money then planned I am pleased with the outcome. I was stressed for a few days over nothing! Maybe next time I won't be so uptight until we're finished and only then if I have reason to be.