The day has come! The happiest day ever — well, at least the happiest day in the last eight months. The other day, we got to walk through the house (in sock-feet of course) and take a look at the newly stained floors. It felt like walking into the house for the first time. Our house. Now that the floors are finished, we can finally start moving our furniture that has been locked up in a climate controlled storage unit since APRIL. I still can’t believe it’s been that long.

If you remember, we started out with carpet in the three bedrooms and tile in the kitchen. We also has a closet or two that had linoleum flooring (check out the full floor plan breakdown here). In order to improve the overall flow of the house, we decided to rip out the carpet and tile and put hardwood floors in these areas. We also chose to have the existing hardwood floors refinished (more about that process here, here and here). Check out what the house looked like when we purchased it (for the complete recap, check out the house tour):

After a really good cleaning, new fixtures here and there, a lot of paint, old fashioned elbow grease and, of course, the new floors, here is what the house looks like today:

Since we don’t have all of our light fixtures up yet, the floor color looks as though it goes between brown and reddish brown. In natural light (which is what we love) it’s definitely brown brown, though. Some of the old light bulbs (bright white, industrial CFLs that we’re not big fans of) make the flooring look more red. That’s really not what we want, so we’ll be putting in some different light bulbs in the near future.

We are so pleased with how the new kitchen floors look! Before, the area was broken up by the tile, which made the kitchen look so much smaller. Now that the wood has replaced the tile in the kitchen, it really opens up the space! Read more about our plans for the kitchen here.

The already long hallway seems even longer now with the dark flooring:

Before the floors were refinished, we were worried that the new paint color in the guest bedroom would be way to bright. But now that the floors are a nice dark walnut, it has toned down the wall color tremendously:

Here’s Greg’s soon-to-be office and a sliver of the master bedroom through the door:

We really love how the floor color looks with the new tile in the bathrooms:

The master bedroom. I can’t wait to move our bedroom furniture in!

What was the price tag on this house-wide project? Here’s the breakdown…

BUDGET BREAKDOWN:
Felt Floor Lining $47.98
Shoe Molding for entire house: $278.71
Red Oak Flooring(886 sq ft): $1,955.54
Ripping up Carpet/Tile & Installing Hardwood Flooring (886 sq ft): $1,400
Refinishing & Staining (approx. 1,800 sq ft): $2,600
GRAND TOTAL: $6,282.23

Worth. Every. Penny. In our opinion, the house doesn’t even look like the same place. With our paint, hardware and flooring choices, it feels like our house rather than the previous owner’s. Now that everything is finished, paid for and photographed; it is time to celebrate. Tonight, we are celebrating with takeout and a movie (on a laptop) in the house that feels more ours than it ever has!

So this wouldn’t be considered the longest blog post known to man, we decided to share our step by step flooring process in a separate post later this week.