Refinished (and gorgeous) floors

I finally took a picture of the new bathroom; all it's missing are the mirrors above the sinks.

The floors are refinished and look amazing. I'm seriously reconsidering how long we'll stay in this house now because we will never have floors this nice again. Here are shots of the living room/entry, the hallway upstairs, and our new bedroom.

Now the brand new floor in the dining room doesn't look so good when it's compared to the refinished old floor. It looks downright cheap, actually, and it certainly was not a cheap floor. The refinished floor is on the left, the new floor is on the right:

And remember the section of the floor that was painted green? Here's a before and after of that section.

Seriously, we can't get over how good these floors look. There are just a few small things left and then the crew will be out of there. We've been living with Michael's parents the last two weeks while the last of the dust settled and the floors were refinished. There's some cleaning we need to do before moving back in and bringing the cats back - we don't want them tracking dust from the stairs to the third floor and the third floor itself down to the rest of the house. And we need to get curtains for the living room so that we can start moving into and enjoying the new space without feeling like we're being watched. Because we probably will be watched in this neighborhood.

And We're Back!

So...a lot has happened in the past month or so, both on the house and elsewhere. We took a super fun trip to Texas, and I switched jobs. But back to the house. This phase of the renovation is almost complete. I didn't post pictures before we left for our vacation because duct work was going in for the second HVAC unit, and that's just not very exciting to see. There were a couple other projects going on then, too; we have new windows on the front of the house:

And the closets in the bedrooms were framed:



We also had, and still have, the new duct work intruding in on our current bedroom on the third floor:

Now, we have a new bathroom:

I apparently haven't taken pictures of the finished bathroom...I'll get to that next time. But the toilet and vanity and the lighting are all installed and it looks really good! The closets are done in both bedrooms. The door frames for the closets in the master bedroom have the rosettes and fluting like the door frames downstairs, which is a nice touch. One of the two windows in this bedroom has that same pattern in the frame, and I think we'll get the other one redone so that everything matches.

And, there used to be a door between the two bedrooms (formerly a kitchen and a big room we used for storage):

And I haven't taken a picture of that wall now, either. Well, use your imagination. It looks like a white wall now.

On the first floor, we have thresholds. Michael calls them speed bumps.

And now for the most exciting part - the almost refinished floors. You can see what they used to look like a couple pictures up. And that ugly green floor? It's gone! Here's what the floors look like after being sanded down:

They look so good that we're not going to stain them; the natural color is quite lovely. This makes me rethink paint colors now, since I thought we'd have darker floors, but I'll get over that. The floors upstairs have also been sanded; they don't look quite as good, but it's still a huge improvement. Here's the floor in the front bedroom, which used to be painted brown. The sanding wasn't completed when I took the picture; it looks much, much better than this:

And that's what has happened over the last month or so. The next big project will probably be painting, which we (and some of our loved ones) will do, and then moving all of our furniture into the new rooms. Then buying more furniture because all we have now is mostly what I had when I lived in a one-bedroom apartment. This house is a little bigger than my old 800-square-foot apartment.