Please view the larger version to truly enjoy the photo.

Room fully de-rugged. A burst of unexpected energy in me also produced a final furniture arrangement I really like. This view is from the hallway leading to our two hobby rooms. The kitchen entrance is on the far right.

It’s not really that shocking of an admission that I was somewhat scared of starting this undertaking. Ripping up the last vestage of carpet, though, helped. I think I can pull it off. Or at least make it look good enough for our rustic/shabby chic tastes.

I’ve just about settled on Minwax products for the process. Going with a darker (undecided) Minwax^® Wood Finish™ stain and a Minwax^® Water Based Polyurethane for Floors finish. I have also decided to properly sand the floors and fill in gaps with the Minwax^® Sanding Sealer.

As an endeavor such as this takes planning (and other than googling, done none.) , I’ve decided to hold of doing anything this weekend and instead wait to the following weekend to start the grand undertaking..

Gumption delivered more floor detail this last weekend. We agreed that either we pull the carpeting up, or we don’t. There is no halfway here. (Okay, in fact, this picture is showing precisely halfway, but you know what I mean.)

I ended up yanking out a little more than half of the carpeting in the living room to reveal a once gorgeous 89 year old wood floor with a deep mahogany stain. At the same time, we had a contractor willing to match a crazy counter-offer I made to him for re-finishing our floors - 300 dollars less than his original quote.

It seems, however, the in-thing for flooring nowadays is the grotesque orange-yellow look of naked wood with clear varnish on top of it, ala Ikea. His quote proudly stated that he will perform tons of sanding to remove every single imperfection in the floor and lay down a swedish finish that will be hard as nails and feel like glass underfoot.

Only problem is that’s the exact opposite of what we want.

We love character, detail, history. That’s one of the main reasons we bought a house built in 1917 and not one of the McMansions up the street. We looked at new flooring. And kept going back to the “hand scraped” look. Deep bevels and heavy textures in the wood from the days of leveling a floor using hand tools. The feel underfoot of time, craftsmanship, nature. Not a bowling alley lane

So…. After many a go at google, I have decided to take a gamble and do it myself. After all, house redesign and remodeling isn’t about doing it just like the pro’s, it’s about trying new things to discover something you like. A prime example of this that comes to my mind is a decorating show where the owner decided he wanted a cement bathtub. He cast it himself and it turned out amazing and is now an interesting and functional one-of-a-kind piece.

So, this weekend I’m going to pull up the rest of the carpet. I’m going to rent a 40 buck a day floor buffer with an abrasive pad on it and scrape up the dirt and chalk on the floor. Then we are going to test putting a light stain over the existing floor - hoping it soaks into the light warn-to-the-wood areas, and slightly darkens the places with existing stain. Then, without sanding any uneven boards or raised grain, we are going to varnish with a waterborne system that’s extremely less toxic than the standard swedish finishes.

Do we care that it won’t be as hard as nails? That the raised grain may be detectable on our bare feet? Or that it may have an uneven, reclaimed barnwood look to it? Not at all.. In fact, that’s what we are hoping for..

Click here for a larger version of the picture.

Couldn’t get to sleep lastnight. Called in sick this morning. After breakfast at noon, and staring into the computadora for way too long, I finally got up and moved a piece of furniture aside and confirmed something we’ve been hoping for; Lovely wood floorboards. Hidden by a grotesque carpet and, oddly, painted white. Unsure if the white is just from a bulk painting of the walls and thins out in the center, or if they actually (strangely) painted the whole floor. Either way, we are happy. Now all we need is one weekend and between $2-$6 per sqft for a warm, rich wooden floor.

Ludwig: I have the ball! Oh joy! What a beautiful day for having the ball! I will just stay here and chew on my ball!

Ludwig: And chew! And chew! Mmmmf, mmph, errrrmph! I LOVE MY BALL!

Riley: MINE!!

Ludwig: Drat.

And here’s the finished plan for the small patch of garden along the back side of the house. I have to admit to starting my list of plants before we even knew for certain that we had the house.

Steven and I braved the rain last weekend and explored the Nursery at Mt Si, which is just a few miles down the road from us in North Bend. I really didn’t expect much from it but we ended up being rather pleasantly surprised. They had a fantastic selection, competitive prices, and some really great garden accessories that would be difficult to find outside of an upscale garden shop. I got soaked but I loved every minute of it. They had almost all the plants on my wishlist, except for a few of the lesser known English roses. Those I’m resigned to ordering from online.

Steven loved one of the Japanese maples. It really was very lovely, but you could see that it was an older, mature specimen and I’m sure they would have wanted far more for it than we would be willing to pay. But once that horrid rhodie is ripped out of the back yard, I was thinking that would be the perfect space for a Japanese maple.

And speaking of horrid rhodies, those hot pink rhododendrons and azaleas in front of the house, along with the pink hydrangeas, are being dug up on Saturday. I found someone to take them and his brother-in-law the landscaper is coming out to remove them. That makes me feel a bit better. I know he’ll be professional and try not to damage my lilac when he takes them out.

Can you tell I’m a little bit giddy about having a garden?

…a garden.  I have a garden with weeds.  I have a garden with plants I don’t particularly care for.  I have a garden that needs cleaned out, tilled, soil added, fertilized, and planted.  I guess what I really have is a lot of work to do.

Oh, I could have went and bought a new lawn mower. Instead I setup a custom RSS feed that polled Craigslist for anybody selling anything in Snoqualmie.

When it hit on a garage sale for this weekend four houses down with a free lawnmower, I jumped. I emailed them asking if I could come pick it up immediately.

I now have a dirty, greasy, completely broken lawn mower sitting in my garage. And my first “fixit” project in my new house. Bwahahahahahaha…..

update 5/1/07: yeah…. it’s gathering oil and dust in the garage… i never got it working and we finally went and bought a used one a month lather that has been working wonderfully… oh well..