Instead of wedding crafting...

I have been refinishing my floors with my fiance. Chris is trying to fix up my house so it is less ghetto when my parents have to sell it. (I rent from my parents and I absolutely LOVE my house, but it *is* ghetto.) Sad. I don't want it to be sold, but sometimes in life we have to do things we don't want to do, or so I'm told. It is my grandmother's house where my entire family grew up, so there are a lot of memories there. Unfortunately, my grandma and Gunnar (step-grandpa) renovated the house in 1980. Yes. Ew. They did lots of bad things, including carpeting over beautiful 100+ year old hardwoods. But, we tore out the carpet and refinished the hardwoods! Here are some floor before and afters...while not perfect, the improvement is amazing! Yay! So much prettier! (Please excuse the terrible photos. I'm not photographer, and taking decent pictures of a floor is exceedingly difficult, so I discovered!)

Dining Room Before:

And After:

World's Ugliest Tile(TM) in the Hallway:

Aaaand after:

There used to be some built in shelves with leaded glass doors, but my grandparent's removed those (*sigh*) and we were left with this mess:

But after refinishing, it's hardly noticeable(now that doesn't mean that I don't want to have Chris rebuild the built-ins. I'd love for the house to have some of its original charm back.):

We also did the living room, for the record:


We still have to buy/stain/install baseboards and new doorway thresholds, but the improvement is unbelievable. Oh, and clearly we'll need to repaint or at the very least touch up the walls. The walls were a serious casualty of this process. And, just so you know, I never want to undertake this process again! (Did I mention there are still 2 bedrooms waiting to be refinished. Ugh.)

Now if only I can con someone into helping Chris put all my furniture back...I'd really like to have my house back (and cleaned - ack!) so that I can get a move on with some crafts! I feel so behind!

For the love of hardwoods...

But, first, a progress report on the wedding planning. I'm extremely happy to report that we hired our photographer! Her name is Abbey Hepner. I love her work and I think she's great! Click here to see her website and amazing work. I think she will be the perfect person to capture our day in photos. I'm very excited!

We are still working on a band, and I hope I can report more here soon!

But, this weekend will be not at all about wedding planning. In light of the fact that I like pretty things, we are going to spend the next weekend (week!?) refinishing my hardwood floors to transform them from ugly to pretty. The floors have been covered by nasty, completely usgusting carpet for the last thirty-plus years, so they are begging to be redone. I can actually hear them at night - it's a bit creepy. :) This is going to be quite the project, and the part I am looking forward to most is it being over. Chris, however, is very excited to use large power tools. The living room floors are in decent shape, except that a couple of missing boards had to be replaced, and there are a few areas where someone cut a square in the floor - luckily in areas that the floors will likely be covered by furniture. This seems to be common all over the house - I don't know what someone (step-grandpa?) was thinking. More attention will have to be paid to the areas that used to be covered by charming bookshelves dividing the living and dining rooms. The floors there are covered in plaster, and I won't lie, I almost hope those areas don't come out too well and need to be covered so we can rebuild the shelves. I love the idea!

The cat knows something is up (hmm...all the living/dining room furniture being stashed in the various bedrooms around the house is her first, best clue) and is going to be sooooo irritated when she realizes in a few hours that I'm locking her in the kitchen for at least a week. Luckily, she can get to the basement from there and cat around in the spooky, cobwebby grossness down there - she likes that; what cat wouldn't?

Here's the "before" photo - hopefully I'll have a lovely "after" photo to share soon! Oh, but we also have to buy, cut and stain baseboards, because apparently my grandparents thought that replacing baseboards wasn't really necessary, so instead they threw them out. Sigh.



Here's the thing - I already love my house in all it's ghetto/needs so so so much work glory, but once it starts to really look nice, I'm going to have that much harder of a time leaving...