Two years into homeownership...

Hi folks, I've taken lots of photos in the last few weeks, hoping to do lots of posts about home remodeling, gardening, and those stinking cute lambies, and then I got caught up in this little thing we call life.  So I'm a little behind.  But here's a little story about how it took us two years of home-ownership to finally get our bed moved upstairs:

When we first bought our house the upstairs looked like this:

Lovely orange and green shag carpet

And the stairway looked like this:

More carpet!

And then this winter, Joey went a little stir-crazy and did this:

A week before having guests over for a Christmas party...

And then my dad came and cleaned it up a bit and now it looks like this:

And this is pretty much where it is today, until my dad comes out to visit again... So why were we sleeping in the first-floor office/den for the last two years?  Because our box spring wouldn't fit up the stairs.  Even after we tore down walls, the level between the doorway (there's a door that closes) at the bottom of the stairs and the pitch of the stairs made it impossible to get the box spring more than a couple feet up without getting wedged in.  The mattress could bend, but the box spring is pretty solid.  So after waffling forever about what we wanted to do with the box spring (build a new one, get two custom-made halves?)  We decided to cut it in half.  

Before it's operation on the front porch

Another reason we may have taken a long time moving upstairs is that after we ripped out all the nasty shag carpet (the day we closed on the house) and ripped out thousands of carpet staples one by miserable one, we didn't know what we wanted to do with the flooring upstairs.  As you can see in the pictures above the wood underneath the carpet was not that great and would take a lot of time and work to refinish.  Also, the back bedroom has tile that can't be removed because it is old and probably contains asbestos, which is better to cover than to break up and release into the air.  So for a while we considered carpeting the entire upstairs again...no shag this time!  But, I'm not a huge fan of carpet (it gets dirty, it's slippery on the stairs, and I don't want to vacuum dog hair out of it!) and we probably couldn't afford it anyway.  And so we took the plunge and painted the wood floor!

As you can see in the photo below, the floor is painted!  We used ACE Hardware's porch and floor paint in Dusty Jeans blue.  Here is the box spring, after a circular saw, hand saw, and a pair of scissors turned it into one piece that could fold in half in the middle, still connected by it's springs.  It took a little muscle and a lot of freaking out (on my part) to finally get it up those stairs!

After removing the old shag-tastic carpet and the staples, we painted the room light green and left the molding with its original stain.  Then, since we couldn't get our bed upstairs, we moved into the office downstairs, threw some twin beds into the mess that we called the upstairs for guests to sleep on and called it a day...or two years.  We pretty much avoided the upstairs and all the stuff we shoved up there when we moved in and pretended we lived in a one-story house until we had overnight guests.  Then we banished them to the black hole of our upper floors.  Sorry everyone. 

After an entire weekend of repainting the walls, molding, windows in Linen White and finally painting the floor blue, we are finally settled into our room.  It is certainly not a "master bedroom."  There's no attached bath or walk-in closet and the room is pretty tiny, but the house was built in 1908!  There is a small closet that Joey will use for his clothes and I will use the closet in the bedroom next door (where we shoved all the stuff that was in this room!)  The windows need a few more coats of paint and the new blinds need to be installed.  The doors still need paint as well.  And I am looking for side tables and a wicker clothes hamper.  Otherwise, it is a very sunny room, and very simple.  We feel like we are on vacation- now if only I could get the rest of my house to feel that way!  I feel a garage sale/Goodwill drop-off coming soon.

So here's the before when we first bought the house and here's the much better in-progress:

Dark before

Sunny in-progress

Thanks for sticking with my rambling post...parts of it kept deleting and the pictures were doing very annoying things...so I may have lost my train of thought more than once!  I'll be back soon with lambs and garden projects!