January 2, 2011

• Floor show

   Ready for the before and after pics?

  

  This rather large, very open room wraps around the kitchen and forms a hallway running nearly the length of the house, where it intersects with a shorter hallway on either end leading to the bedrooms and it also kinda morphs into our front entryway (off to the left in this photo), too. It’s hard to see with the pretzel jar where it is on the bar top next to all those photos, but that bar top required that a chunk be removed from the door frame trim when it was added on and that has always bothered me. The other thing that bothered me about that thing was that the ONLY electrical outlet on that wall was covered up when that cabinet was added on. Before we had the painting done in there, my “demo crew” (one is seated at the bar in the kitchen eating area) removed that cabinet from the wall and we had our contractor replace several door frames along with that one when they replaced the baseboards. (If the baseboards and door frames had not been originally stained very dark then painted over with white latex paint, I might have tried to salvage them.) Not wanting to waste any good storage space, I then had them remove the ugly brown bar top and the toe kick base and hang the cabinet on an empty wall in our utility room…

  So we now have this:

  

  We used the darker wood planks in the doorway between the existing and the new flooring and we also changed the direction of the planks so it would not look like we tried (and failed) to match the wood in the kitchen area. The floor around the fireplace turned out especially nice, too. Our contractor used some sort of really heavy duty (and noisy) saw to undercut the masonry and the floorboards just fit underneath so we did not have to rig up some sort of trim for the curved fireplace. While they were cutting, he had one of his helpers follow his path with a huge shop vac and that really kept the dust down a lot. You can see a little of the great job they did behind the Christmas tree. I also love the way the colored lights reflected off the new floor:

  

  Of course, it looked even better after Santa came!

  

  The front hall was probably the biggest challenge of all, but our contractor guy was up for it! We decided to use the contrasting color of wood around the sunken entryway to call attention to the elevation change from the tiled area and our contractor did the plank direction change thing again, which turned out really nice:

  

  If we zoom in on the manger scene, you might just get a glimpse of a familiar face:

  

  Not his best side, but what can you do???

  • 6:59 pm
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