Gorgeous!

Drink in this photo of our new maple flooring... it's just beautiful! I can't thank Ted and my dad enough for their hard work installing the new floor--Dad was at our house all week last week laboring away, and Ted spent three full days working as his apprentice. This is the best shot I have right now showing the expanse of hardwood from the dining room (which is where Ted was standing when he took this photo) through the kitchen and hallway.

You may also notice, if you look at the right hand edge of the photo, that I also decreed that the dining room MUST be painted before the furniture was replaced. Yes, I made my poor husband paint after a tough week of work, both at home and at "the office." In my defense, though, I will point out that I did at least half the painting, even going so far as to climb up on the ladder (but only VERY carefully and tentatively, and with respect to my physical limitations) and crawling around on my hands and knees painting trim. We (okay, mostly I) selected the color "Drizzle" from Sherwin-Williams, and I bought the "zero-fumes" Harmony paint, which, as luck would have it, was on sale last week. We painted all Friday afternoon and Saturday morning, and--honest to God--you could not smell it when you walked in the house. Amazing!

The dining room is now fully painted, including the walls on either side of this photo. The muted greenish-blue really sets off the lovely variation of maples in the floor, and I'm just tickled to be done with it--and to have eliminated three more white walls in my house! As I've told Ted, if I had my way, there would not be a single white wall in the whole place.

We're still in the process of putting furniture back in place and dusting everything, as every surface in the house is covered with wood dust from the floor project, so I do not yet have my official "After" photos. Stay tuned for beautifully staged photos of the end result.

In the meantime, here are a few more pics of the project and on-site laborers.

Sweet Deal

For the past seven years or so, our dining room set has been a vintage 50s chrome-and-formica set, a "Gray Ice" aluminum-trimmed (?) table with vinyl-covered chairs. Something like this, only with green chairs instead of blue:

My sister and her husband bought the set for me and Ted at a consignment shop here in Iowa City, as an engagement present. We've loved it and used it well, hauling it from Iowa City to Chicago, to the suburbs, to the country, and back to Iowa City again. (All of those moves happened in the space of two years, before Arlo was born.) It's still in remarkably good shape, considering all the miles we've put on it.

However... now we are preparing to put down new maple hardwood floors in our dining room (and kitchen and hallway) and we feel like having a metal-legged table and chairs is no longer wise, if we want to keep our new floors in good condition for a long long long long long long time. And yes, that is what we want.

The prospect of buying a new dining room set, on top of the cost of the new flooring, was an ominous one. I've been browsing online, trawling the secondhand shops, doggedly attending garage sales at every opportunity--all to no avail . . . until this weekend.

We found some nice chairs at a garage sale on Sunday--as it turns out, the garage sale of my cousin's mother-in-law (makes me sound like a Townie, doesn't it??), and we didn't want to pass them up because they were sturdy, attractive, in good condition, and priced right at $10 a pop. Not actual cherry wood, but a nice cherry-toned finish on well-built pine (we think) chairs.

Ted set them up around our formica table, and figured that would be it for a while. He reasoned that we could live with the mismatched table and chairs, since "the chairs are really the only thing that moves against the floor anyway." This notion did not appeal to me. You just can't get much more discord in a room than pairing a 50-year-old formica-top table with a set of nearly new cherry-stained chairs. I wish I had taken a picture. It was cringe-worthy.

I talked Ted into making a trip out to the Stuff, Etc. store in Coralville after church yesterday, though, and lo and behold! There was this attractive cherry-colored dining table--with two leaves--for sale, and it looked to be a near-perfect match! The only problem was, it was priced at $399. Which seemed like a lot for a secondhand table, which, admittedly, was not in perfect condition, although it was better than average and of good quality. Closer inspection revealed that it was from the Bombay Company, which is sort of an upscale Pier 1. (I did some looking online today, and see that their dining tables tend to be priced in the $700+ range.)

Imagine my delight when I discovered that--because the table had been there since March--it was 80 PERCENT OFF that $399 price! The final price, tax included, was $84 measly dollars.

So...

Ta Da!

Not bad for $134, eh?

Ahhhh, the thrill and satisfaction of a bargain found!

Big Boy Bed

Arlo finally has his big boy bed now, and he couldn't be happier. This is how I found him the morning after his first night sleeping in the new bed (Monday morning). Just like the first time we laid him, as an infant, in his big ole crib, he looks so tiny and forlorn. And I wonder if he aligned himself across the headboard because it felt more like the crib that he's so accustomed to.

Also note the dual Sock Monkey motif--on the jammies and on the bed. Arlo's choice, of course--though the jammies preceded the sheet set by several months, we were lucky to come across the matching sheets at Target this weekend. I'm surprised you can even see him laying there, he's so well camouflaged.

Well, he slept all night without a fuss--though it did take a little longer to get him settled down at bedtime. All in all, he made the transition like a champ. We just hope that he won't have second thoughts when we bring the crib back out for the baby several months down the road.

On Tuesday night he slept vertically, though still eschewing the pillow and blankets. The step forward is that he allowed the pillow to remain on the bed. Baby steps.

Ted and I laughed about how soon the day will come that Arlo will be sprawled across this bed, snoring, with his big adolescent feet hanging off the end. Fifteen years? Looking at his dad, I'd say more like twelve.

Sigh.