Carpet, carpet, carpet

The new carpet is very soft, very quiet, and most of all VERY CLEAN.  You can lay on it and roll around and play on it without wondering what germs, dirt, and bugs might be hiding in it.  The last of the main plush carpet was installed yesterday upstairs.

The front of the carpet has been wrapped over the edge of the floor.  The wood part will be covered by the striped stair carpet.

Mister e's new room color.  The picture makes it look lighter and more turquoise than it actually is.  It is more like a stormy sea.  We are going to put up shelves for the Star Wars ships.  e has requested that the shelves be the same color as the walls, so it looks like the ships are flying in space.  Genius and simple solution!

Stripes for the stairs

This is the amazing hospitality carpet with stripes!  The pile is very dense and low.  Some of the stripes are raised.  We get to keep all the left over carpet and had a small piece of the stripe.  So we unrolled it in the hallway to get a feel for the stripe.  Love it!  I really wish the piece were longer so we could do a runner for the hall.

The stair carpet has been cut and is off to the binder to have the edges bound.  The guys will be back next week to put it in.  That will be almost three weeks of carpet laying.  Irving (our dog) can barely stand having people in the house especially people he can't see running up and down the stairs and pounding on the floor.  He is so worn out from not barking yesterday that he is sleeping all day today.

How are we getting all these projects done?  We have turned the dining room into a temporary paint station/command central.  The boxes hold the tools, brushes, outlet plates, painter's caulk, etc.  All the various cans of paint and primer are on the floor.  After the carpet install, there has been a lot of touching up.  This is faster than putting everything back down in the basement and having to run up and down two flights of stairs.  This way, we only have to run up and down one flight of stairs.  Good thing we have a dine-in kitchen.

Stairs

We removed the carpet from the stairs.  Our plan is to paint the treads and put down a striped runner thus making it easier to clean the corners of each stair and only paying for the carpet where you actually used it.  Besides, striped runners on white stairs look very cool.

Fir stairs that squeak if you breathe on them

Most of the carpet is out.  You can still see the
original grey carpet on the upper set of stairs.

However finding striped carpet was challenging.  We asked our carpet guy and he kept showing us subtle sort-of stripes in non-contrasting colors.  They were more "stripe wanna be's" than actual stripes.  We wanted this kind of look:

We finally had to show the carpet guy a picture on the iPhone.  Then he got it.  The type of carpet we wanted was called "hospitality carpet" (think bad casino carpet).  If you do a web search for hospitality carpet, you will find a gold mine of patterns, swirls, optical illusions, tapestries, etc!  Fortunately our carpet guy also does hotel and industrial installs and had an entire room of hospitality carpet swatch books.  We settled on a fabulous black with multi-color stripes.  I can't wait to see it on the stairs!

In the meantime, we have pulled staples, sanded the edges of the each tread and riser, primed, and painted 3 coats of paint on the staircase.

Upstairs Repaint-Recarpet-Cleaning Extravaganza

After jury duty I was seized with the overwhelming desire to get going on painting projects.  So I came  home and opened a can of paint and forced my family to assist.

Our original bedroom color is similar to the color of computers in the 90's sort of a UV tainted plastic putty.  It is not an attractive color at all.  And to make things worse, I spent several days selecting this color the first time we painted our bedroom 12 years ago.  I wanted to bedroom to be a sanctuary with a little boudoir thrown in and the putty wasn't cutting it.  Also it didn't really show off the color of the wood furniture.

The warm putty color and the previous closet situation.

Choosing the right dusky lavender orchid amongst
the piles of stuff.

At about this point, I decided that we weren't under enough pressure to finish, so we ordered carpet and scheduled a install date a couple of weeks out.  That would allow us to focus more acutely on painting Ewan's room, the hallway, and the stairs.  Nothing like a deadline to get things done!

In progress

We decided to change the center alcove into a double hung closet space and move the high boy dresser into one of the closets.  The high boy was originally in a location in the room that allowed for frequent banging of elbows, shoulders and heads (depending on the growth spurt).  Needless to say, the family is much happier with the new location and enjoying fewer bruises.

The closet fully loaded.  I did clean and reduce,
but I am nuts about vintage clothing
so can't reduce the closet contents by much.

The other direction

I will post more pictures with it cleaned up and decorated.  We also have some of the new carpet installed!!  The old carpet came with the house 17 years ago.  It was old, felted, and not comfortable.  The new carpet is posh and makes the upstairs very quiet.

On a completely unrelated note, I discovered my son "gaming the system" while playing Wii Fit.  He figured out a way to hold completely still for the meditation game.

December Recap

The blog has been quiet, but now that January is here and kids are back in school hopefully I can settle into a schedule again.  I need to do some creative things and post some of the things that I made over the summer.  We also have some house projects in process too.  LONG overdue things which involve cleaning out closets and cupboards (Yay!) and painting!

To recap the last bit of December:

We had snow!

Unfortunately... it didn't stick, but was pretty as it fell.

 Dog biscuits for the dog and peanut butter/chocolate brownies for Santa.   The brownies have a stick and a half of butter in them.  Awesomely good... but awesomely bad for the body.  Definitely a once-a-year treat.

My dear friend Stacey bought a bottle of Prosecco the last time we were together before she left for Germany.  Now I am hooked and have been enjoying it over the holidays.  Goes well with potato chips too!  Definitely a more than once-a-year treat... sometimes a once-a-week treat... if not daily.

The Portland institute to doughnuts- VooDoo Doughnut.  I LOVE their boxes!

There were more doughnuts in here, but there is only a maple bacon bar (my favorite) and a voodoo doll (with cherry filling and a pretzel stick for stabbing) left.  Definitely a more than once-a-year treat, but not too often.

I enjoyed a couple of days of jury duty over the two days following Christmas.  The second day was beautiful downtown, so I snapped a couple of pictures.  This is a Michael Graves Memphis-style building.  Oddly weird but interesting.  You can learn more about Memphis Design here.

The elk statue all dressed for the holidays.

We don't have many clear, sunny days in Portland, but when we do they are beautiful.