Bedroom Makeover

 

For a few months now, we've been working on getting the old carpet in our upstairs—which has our master bedroom, hallway with closets, and the master bathroom—replaced with wood flooring. The biggest reasons for this were that aesthetically, I much prefer wood (and the downstairs is wood), but even more importantly, the folks who owned our house before us smoked. And while they didn't smoke in the house, their clothing transferred some of the smell to the carpet...and it lingered just enough to bother me. As I think it would any non-smoker. Plus, carpet doesn't last forever and after I think about a decade, that carpet needed to go!

So I did my research to find eco-friendly flooring that would match the oak we have downstairs. I wanted both wood that was Forest Stewardship Council certified (so we knew that mountains weren't being irresponsibly logged for our floors since we like the mountains), and that we didn't need to have chemical-laden adhesives or finishes applied since we can't open the windows to air the space out...and sleeping and inhaling those fumes was highly unappealing. I found engineered oak from Kahrs, got the New York red oak that matched our downstairs and we were off.

Let me tell you, this was not as easy of a project as I had thought (the details are uninteresting, but I learned a lot about accountability—meaning, if you ever order something for a big project, check every box TWICE to be sure you got what you thought you should—and I am a big fan of the company that we hired to install it. (We considered doing it ourselves, but after watching professionals for five days, I am eternally grateful that we didn't.)

The result? Airy, spaciousness that feels more open and clean. The sunlight plays off of the golden hues of the floors in a remarkably lovely way, and it's really easy to clean (no need to haul out the vacuum). I really loved our house before, but this has completely transformed the upstairs into one of my very favorite spaces.

And it inspired me to clean out all of our closets and half of the basement, and to do a mini makeover of the bed area of our master bedroom. I changed the bedskirt to one with more ruffles, changed the curtains to ones that were heavier (and creamy silk, which is a nice backdrop), and I brought up my quilt from Katherine and some pillows that suddenly cried out to be there. All of these things were already in our house, I just repurposed them, which was very exciting.

It's been a little hard for me to leave the house the past few days, but I think that's probably a pretty good problem to have.