New flooring and new paint in the living room

I am so excited to share some updates on the new house today!  I still have a few rooms left in the old house to share but figured I would take a break this week and show you progress on our living room and even a fall post at the new house and then wrap up the old house in the following 2 weeks. 

So let’s go back to May and closing day on our new house – things have been busy but yet been moving VERY slowly with a home needing lots of updating and a baby born just 3 weeks after we moved.  But it is slowly coming and looking back at these pictures helps me to realize how much it really has changed even though it isn’t even close to where I want it yet. 

This is the living room the day we closed.  We loved the bigger area, the open concept, and the tall ceilings.  Although I do have to say I wasn’t quite prepared for the echo and the way things are louder in a room with high ceilings.  Anyone have any tips on how to minimize that?  We don’t have blinds or curtains up yet so hoping as I add more linens to the room that may help.

The carpet was in horrible shape – way worse than these pictures show.  By the back door it had huge runs in it and pet stains and other stains all throughout. 

I never got to share the craziness of our move so here’s the crazy story.  Because of delays in closing on our old house which then pushed our new home closing back because of needing to close on that one before we could close on this one due to financing, we were pushed in to a major time crunch with moving. We had negotiated a 5 day extension to stay in our old home after closing to give us some time for the 2nd closing to happen and then be able to move and also get flooring installed before we had to be actually residing in the new home but all the delays messed that all up.  We closed on our old house on a Friday and signed papers on our new home the following Wednesday and had to be out of our old home 2 hours later.  Plus add me being 37.5 weeks pregnant at the time… it was quite insane!  Oh the stories we will be able to tell our little one of the weeks leading up to her arrival.  So we packed trucks in the days/evenings leading up to the 2nd closing and then moved everything in one afternoon to the new home.  We slept on a mattress in the floor for 2 nights with all of our possessions packed into the garage, kitchen, and into a moving truck in the driveway while we waited for the flooring to be installed.  After the complicated and frustrating process of buying and selling and a pregnant woman seriously going crazy just wanting to nest and settle a bit before baby arrived, I just wanted to be at our new home and not staying at a hotel or on my brothers couch.  So 8 am the day after closing this was happening in the living room…  

And while the installers were working on that, I was working on this!  I got the whole kitchen cleaned and unpacked in the 2 days it took them to do flooring.  We opted to wait to install new flooring in the kitchen for several reasons (budget, time to live with the current cabinet color/arrangement and decide what we want to do in there, and honestly just needing the space for boxes because of the time crunch) – hoping this fall we will get new flooring in the kitchen. 

So by the end of the week the living room was looking like this!  I have wanted dark wood flooring for a long time and was so glad we could do this in our new home!  I am still learning the best ways and routine to keep it clean (would love to know your favorite cleaning routine or product!) but I really do like it. 

And for those of you that want the details this is the brand and color of our flooring – it is 5 inch wide engineered wood – Woodhouse Hand Sculpted Birch Plank Ponderosa in Merlot color.

I couldn’t believe the difference it made with the fireplace brick color too.  We may be making some changes to that in the future too but living with it for now until we decide.

If you remember in the before pictures there was 3 different floorings you could see from the front door. 

Well know you will just see two.  And the wood is run in the front 2 rooms and into the living room and in the hallway between the bedrooms.  We opted for carpet in the bedrooms which I’ll show you later.  And we will do some kind of tile floor in the kitchen. 

Then the next week new paint was happening!  Again I was 38 weeks pregnant by then plus 20-30 foot ceilings and angles – yep, I wasn’t about to tackle painting this room.  So I had a local friend/painter already scheduled before we moved to come paint this room.  I chose to use the same color I used in our last house (Wheat Bread by Behr) because honestly I loved it and it was a perfect taupey neutral without being too beige or too gray.  Wheat Bread is a very close match to Revere Pewter which people love too – I just still had paint left from working with Behr in the past and honestly love their paint. 

Seriously 10 days after closing the living room didn’t even look like the same house!

Here’s the before:

And here’s the after…

Come back on Friday and I’ll show you the next update I did and what the room looks like currently!