DINING ROOM FLOORING

The weekend brought both good news and bad news. As the sad part of the story goes, Johnnie and I were supposed to be in Florida over the weekend on a five-day, girls-only vacation with my mom. On Thursday, the night before our flight was to take off, mom called and said she had a fever of 103 and the trip had to be postponed. It was a triple bummer because a) my mama had the flu, b) our trip got canceled AND c) Ez's surprise weekend project -- installing the dining room flooring while we were gone -- was no longer going to be very surprising since we'd be home to watch it happening.

But the good news: hello, dining room floor! When you last saw our dining room (above), it was ceilingless, dirty and had its own flooring piled up in the middle of the room. Not cute. It was an improvement from its original state, but still so far away from being usable. Now we're another step closer.

Johnnie was happy to supervise Ez and his childhood buddy Chris while they worked and to test out the first couple boards for us. (Please pardon, as usual, the low quality iPhone photos.) Honestly, being the lazy renovation blogger that I am, I don't know what kind of underlayment/moisture barrier they used. It is obviously very red and has little pieces of Styrofoam in it for cushioning. It's probably not very earth-friendly and I'm sorry about that. If anyone is curious about what it is exactly, I can look it up.

For the flooring, we're using tongue-and-groove pine (yes pine) that was milled by an Amish guy my dad knows. We have used pre-finished hardwood flooring in other (newer) parts of the house, and it looks too shiny and new to go with the more rustic feel of this room. We actually wanted something that will show some wear over time. These were also the widest plank boards we've installed yet, and they went down amazingly fast. (Pneumatic flooring nailer for the win!) It would've taken us days to lay this much flooring using the short, two-inch-wide maple boards we used upstairs. 

So now we have a giant wood box for a dining room. Wood, wood and more wood. The plan is to stain and seal the floor and paint the wood planked walls and ceiling to tone down the wood a bit. I mean, I want it to be understood that it's wood, but maybe have it be not so overtly woody on every surface. This isn't Texas Roadhouse. Also the ceilings really are as low as they look. That's the reality of old houses, so there wasn't much that could be done. (Except try not to jump up and down with joy too vigorously when the floors were installed, so I didn't hit my head.)

After my emotional outpouring last week, I don't have a lot of words left to say about this except it is SO NICE to see such a big project (as in, surface area) get checked off the list. It feels big. It still needs to be stained and sealed, but at the same time it still feels like it deserves a big check mark to honor the forward progress, don't you think?