I have a floor!

Hey, how did it get to be Friday so fast?!  I think I officially love four day work weeks!  I'm sorry I couldn't post yesterday, but rather dramatic thunderstorms conspired with our electricity to make working on the computer impossible.  There's nothing like waking up to discover you can't turn on the bathroom light or blow dry your hair...or turn on the computer and publish your post!

I had planned to start sharing some travel stories with you today, but I'm too excited about my new living room floor!  The main floor of my house has been torn up for over a month now while we have worked on the kitchen and living room, and today, with the installation of the new flooring, I am finally able to start pulling things back together. When we moved into this house the first thing I wanted to do was replace the awful green carpet, and now, almost ten years later it's finally happened! As a refresher, here are some 'before' pictures of my living room.  You can see extra dishes and doo-dads piled on the end tables from the kitchen projects.  What you can't see is how old and dingy the green carpet was, so you'll have to trust me on that.  (And by the way, let's all be nice and pretend we don't notice how dusty my trunk is...we had sheet rock dust everywhere from the kitchen ceiling repair.  I promised honesty in my blog, but sometimes it can be a little embarrassing.  Y'all sometimes don't get around to dusting either, right?)

Once the carpet was ripped up (and I simply refuse to talk about how dirty the floor underneath the carpet was--no wonder I sneezed so much in the living room!) we had to live with the subfloor and the boxes of wood that were 'acclimating' for several weeks:

And now comes the fun part!  The installer arrived around 9 yesterday and had the padding all in place before 10, then started laying the floor.  I watched him for a few minutes and then gave a heartfelt prayer of sincere gratitude that my husband and I had realized our limitations and didn't try to d-i-y with the floor installation.  Thank goodness the five minutes of irrational optimism that we could install a wood floor gave way to common sense.  For heaven's sake, we don't even own any power tools!

And tonight, after work, I could finally put my room back together and lovingly place all my special travel mementos back where they belong.  And what the heck, I even dusted the trunk!

I am so happy with the result!  Now, of course, the waiting begins....who will be the first person to spill on it, scratch it or in some other way make it a little less perfect?  Oh well, I know it is inevitable but for today, my cup runneth over.