No Pickles Today!

Well, today I've been battling an awful head/neck ache which started last night, and woke me up a few times, too!  I've only been able to knock it back with advil and tylenol all day!!  It's probably from all the chopping, lifting, bending I've been doing for the past week.  So I decided to take a break today -- I got the jars cleaned and ready, and the cukes are washed and waiting.....I'll get it done tomorrow, for sure!  It will be nice to have my vegetable drawer back in my fridge! :-D
Instead, I did laundry, and cleaned the bathrooms.  I guess I must get regular jobs done around here, too.....it's just no fun to do that stuff!! LOL

So I thought I'd show you my plans for the family room floor that I talk about all the time (but never start work on.... :-P)!
What I want is wood floors, stained wood floors....my only problem is that there is NO WAY I can afford to buy wood boards, especially the kind I want!  I could do laminate, but that's also very expensive.  So I came up with an idea --- PLYWOOD.  Here's what I did, I bought plywood sheets; I had Brian cut them the width I wanted, then I sanded them, stained them, and covered them with 2 coats of satin polyurethane, then we nailed them down!  We did it in the living room first, and I loved how it came out!!  Here is a BEFORE picture.....

That's the sub-flooring, after we pulled up the (hideous) rug.
Here is the first piece down....

LOVE that dark stain!!
And finally, here is the finished floor.....

I love how it looks!!  I used Minwax Early American stain, and the boards are cut to 10inch and 8inch widths, because I didn't want it to look too even, I like the different sizes next to eachother!
I had to draw out a whole plan for it, so I knew which board would go where, and that made it so much easier!
And here is the chart and floor plan for the family room floor.....

Can you see those??  The first one is the floor plan, the second one is the board plan! (LOL)  That's how I figure out how many plywood sheets I need, and how they should be cut!!  Aren't I clever? :-D

And we also put down a plywood floor in our library room, that I painted and stenciled....here's the rug BEFORE....

We had just built the book shelves, but you can see the rug that we cut out!

Now here's AFTER.....

This bottom picture I had taken facing the opposite direction, so it would show more of the floor....I LOVE it!!  I cut that stencil out myself, too!  And I want to use painted and stenciled plywood in all the bedrooms, it's so pretty!!

So there it is.....plyWOOD floors! :-D   And that's why I want to get started on staining the family room wood - I want to buy one or two plywood sheets at a time, have Lowe's cut it in widths (checking my board plan to see how), then I'll stain it and seal it and stack it, then Brian will nail it down, and it will look just as nice as the living room looks!!  These picture are 5 years old, so the floors have been down for that long, and they look as good as they did when they were first done....a little scratched in places, but the plywood has held up perfectly!  And it works out to be about 55 cents a foot - can't beat that, right?!!

If I can ever get it started.....! ^-^