They Don't Call it "Hard"Wood Flooring for Nothing...

On the last episode of OMG This Remodel Is Taking Forever, we had just gotten the outside prepped for stucco and the inside covered in drywall:

Since then, we've made some sweet, sweet progress (smells like tears of joy and extra deodorant, doesn't it?):

After several days of plaster work on the inside—and a thousand pounds of dust on every surface in the house—the room was ready for paint. There may not be any S&M activity taking place in our household (at least none we'll admit to), but we definitely have a 50 Shades of Grey thing going on around here. Living room walls are light grey...kitchen walls are light grey...kitchen countertop and flooring are grey...bathroom tiles and vanity are grey...outside is greyish...Mr. W owns a lot of pairs of grey underwear. You get the picture.

So it seemed only natural for us to go with a soft grey in the bedroom. But we also wanted to do something different with color, so we decided to add a big fat gallery wall accent stripe to the wall our bed will face.

The hope is that it'll have this effect when we hang some of our favorite travel pictures on it: 

Source

Once the paint was on the walls, it was time to take on what became the most arduous task of the entire process (says the girl who did pretty much nothing to help with any of the construction at any point...): Installing the hardwood flooring. If you ever go on Youtube and watch a video of someone installing hardwoods, it looks super easy. Tongue, meet groove, nail, repeat. 

The reality of floor installation was that the nailgun dealie Mr. W bought would more times than not push some wood splinters out, making it impossible to get the tongue tightly in the groove—so he had to slice off the superfluous wood after putting in every nail. And there were approximately a bagillion nails.

What we thought would take about 3 days to install took close to 3 weeks. Needless to say, there was a lot of cursing involved.

But now the floors are all in:

We just have to find some kind soul to come sand them for us. It continues to baffle me how many contractors and craftsmen never return phone calls. It's a wonder they're able to keep their businesses going. Fingers crossed that we can get someone do to it for a reasonable price.

And then we will finally get to move out of the guest room. And not make visitors sleep on mattresses and aerobeds on the floor. And stop overloading every surface with clothes we can't find a place to put. And start working on the bathroom...which currently looks like this:

Wish us luck. We continue to need it every day.