Our Widdle House, Part One of One Billion

So. M and I bought a house. Our first house. We thought, "Hey! Let's get a house that we can work on, and make it just like we want..." Ha. HAHAHAHA. Hrumph. Anyway, for those of you who have NOT seen it, this is it - our KUH-UTE widdle 1950's ranch house. It's in an older neighborhood, with mature trees and nice neighbors. The neighborhood is fairly close to the city, so we're close to M's job and the hospital...for when I EVER graduate nursing school. So...umm, I'm kind of intimidated to start this whole "documenting the house" process, so I'll start with the hardwood floors. And who KNOWS where we'll go from there? Here are some of the "BEFORE" pictures that everyone just loves to see. Just so all of you can see what we were dealing with. Fancy older hardwood floors, under WONDERFUL moss green carpet. The floors are about 50 years old, so that lovely orange-y color was from old polyurethane (says my dad). Soooo we ripped up all the carpets (which included three million staples and carpet tacks...)
...and found only ONE spot of damage - along a wall that has the bathtub directly on the other side.
Not too bad really. We hand-pulled all the nails and staples, and let the refinishers get to work (there was NO way that we were going to do this ourselves. My dad thought we could do it...but M and I decided to leave it up to the professionals...this time at least.

So, after only one day of refinishing the floors, the damaged portion of the floor looked like this:
Pretty! At the beginning of the second day we were forced to make a stain decision.

I HATE decisions. Sigh. We went with a middle brown color, although my heart pines for dark espresso. We have a cat that LOVES to shed, and light gray cat hair + espresso floors = CRAZY D from cleaning ALL the time. So yesh, middle brown it was.

Finally, Day Three Arrived.
SO PRETTY. I can't begin to explain how pretty the floors are. I also cannot begin to tell you how the house STILL smells from paint and polyurethane and blah blah blah. The point is, the floors looked great. Which was a good thing. Because as much as I spazzed about that stain color, IT BETTER LOOK FREAKING GREAT.

Whew. That was a lot of typing/picture editing/editing in general. I don't know HOW those Young House Love kids DO IT. However, I'm happy to share just a piece of this crazy process with all of you. More to come!