new living room

Alicia Asks: so the hardwoods are going in! Which is so exciting! I first of all can not wait to see pictures and hear all about your adventure through re-doing your living room! Even more so, I can't wait to see the finished results in person! But on with the question. I'm sure that working on your main living space has impacted Trent in more ways than one! Tell us about how play time for Trent has been impacted. What are you plans now that the hardwoods are in, will Trent have an area rug to play on? Personally we have put an area rug on our hardwoods and I'm having a hard time deciding if the rug on the hardwoods are cleaner/better for him to play on...In addition to telling us all about Trent's play time, feel free to tell us any stories or details about the room's progress!



Answer: Most of you don't even know what this is all about. Kevin and I have ripped up our carpet in our living & dining area and are in the process of laying new flooring. Bamboo flooring, to be exact. We ripped up our carpet in stages. First we got rid of the carpet in the dining room Then some of the living room. Then more of the living room. Then some more. Then the rest of it. Poor poor Trent - his play/crawl space got smaller - and smaller - and smaller. Of course we didn't want him crawling on the plywood (where there was padding chunks, staples, tack strips) so we had to make sure he was constantly on his carpet patch, no matter how small it was. Towards the end, when there was very little carpet, I spent alot of time with Trent upstairs in his room. Once all the carpet was ripped up (staples removed, tack strips removed) Kevin laid this black paper that covered the plywood. We let Trent crawl all over this. His clothes would get filthy (a mixture of the black material, dog hair, and eventually dirt that we'd track in [and couldn't exactly sweep/vacuum]) but it washed off, no biggie. Trent loved being in his walker on the black paper, as he was able to really cruise around.



Once the laying of the floor started we tried to keep Trent confined to the wood surface, but again, we didn't/don't mind him crawling on the black paper.



One of the biggest annoyances we're dealing with is the MESS! We have living room stuff and dining room stuff(furniture, decor, etc) everywhere. We have shoes laying around (since we cant use our closet right now), we're eating at the coffee table (which is now an arms reach for Trent), we have the flat screen TV standing on the floor right now, Kevin's tools here and there (out of reach most of the time, but still there). It's a disaster area - Trent definitely has very little freedom right now. We're constantly picking him up to put him back in the "safe zone". I didn't really realize how much freedom he DIDN'T have until we went to grandmoms house and Trent was free to roam basically wherever he wanted- and that's exactly what he did. He roamed right into the laundry room to the dog bowls, back behind the couch to the lamp cord....all over. It was great for him.



We have every intention of buying a couple area rugs once the floor is down, but for now Trent just plays on the wood floors. He doesn't seem to mind at all. Once we get rug(s) I doubt we will "confine" Trent to the rug (I doubt we'll be able to confine him to any one place) but we will definitely encourage him to play in the rug vs. the wood (cold?) floor.



So, more about the living space in general, for those who don't know: We (Kevin) started by building a half-wall to separate the dining and living room. It looks great (in our opinion). Then we painted the room(s) a nice "Milk Chocolate". Again, we think it looks great. It's dark, but the room is big enough to pull it off. The painting stage is not 100% done. We have some touching up to do, and some window sills to paint, but nothing big. Kevin worked on the floors all of Labor Day weekend and plans to continue them this upcoming weekend (taking this past weekend off). Once they are complete I doubt we'll be able to afford to do much more right away but eventually we'll get rugs, new blinds, put trim around the windows, buy some new furniture pieces and rearrange the furniture layout. It's a work in progress, that's for sure - but hey, we have 29 more years to get it right.

I'll post pictures after this weekend!