I'm Doing My Happy Dance!! Or....FLOOR!!!!! :-D

Here we go!!!! :-D

This is as far as we got today (almost half the room)......can you believe this took us several hours?!!!  Getting started, measuring, picking out the right boards, cutting and fitting the end pieces, checking placement with my trusty worksheet -- oh, it takes time!

But it's SO worth the work!  I can't believe the transformation and how it impacts the whole room!!!
Here is the Before.....

Here is After.....

(Boy, I sure wish I had gotten around to painting that second coat on the doors, since I'm showing everyone so many pictures of them! :-P)(What can I say, you all know by now that I have ADD!!!)

Ahhh!  What a difference!!  The best part is that as I was waiting for Brian to cut the boards and bring them back, I was excitedly making a mental note of all the "finishing" work I needed to do now! (like those doors!)  My motivation has been rekindled -- YIPEEE!!! :-D

There are always little complications, like SO.....

This end piece was unfortunately placed right where a slight bump in the sub-floor was, so the edge is about 1/16th above the other boards!  It will be an easy fix (sand it even, re-stain and re-seal), but these are the little things that you cannot plan for!!  The lucky thing for us is that we don't want the look of a pristine, perfect floor and room -- I want little imperfections and unevenness in the finished design, so it mimics the old, lived-in homes I love!  So it makes it easier to accept when the boards gap, or the nail gun takes a chunk out of the wood, or the floor bumps up slightly.  Besides, once the furniture and rug are arranged, no one will ever notice any of that stuff, not even me!

Here is the flooring diagram that I made about 5-6 years ago for this project -- yes, I did say years!.....

I didn't re-size the image, so you should be able to get a good look at it by clicking on it. 
This is how I find out what boards I will need for the room.  I don't draw it perfectly scaled, but I DO mark down the exact dimensions of the room, so I can get the true board amounts right. 

I decide on my board widths - for this room we are doing alternating rows of 10inch and 8inch boards (I LOVE the random look of it!) - and then I add up how many of those widths will go across the room (those are my vertical lines).

Then I decide where I want the boards to break -- again, I like it to be as random looking as it can practically be.  I am not willing to waste too much wood!  Plywood sheets are 4x8, so my longest boards are 8ft long, and I place those as randomly as possible and then figure out the sizes of the extra pieces needed to complete each row. 

THEN, with those measurements, I draw up my plywood sheet diagram.....

That's how I know how many sheets I need! 

We don't cut the lengths in my diagram until it's actually time to nail the floor down -- they are just approximate measurements, meant to give the idea of where each board will go -- but my diagram is essential for knowing HOW the finished stack of boards is laid out, and works perfectly for that.

Can you see what's written on the blue sticky note on my plywood diagram???  It's where I wrote what the plywood sheets cost when I drew this up -- it says "$13.95" for a 5/8ths sheet.....that tells perfectly how long ago I planned this because as you remember, the sheets I bought cost $21 now!  That's a 50% increase!! :-P  That drives me crazy, but I just have to put it out of my mind -- I mean, even at the price I paid now, this floor only cost me about 63 cents a square foot!  I think I can be happy with that, right?!! :-D

So there we go!!!  We are both so excited to get this finished -- Brian even said, after he had the first two rows nailed down and he could start to see how it was going to look, that he was so happy we were really getting this done and that I had pushed him by doing the boards and ripping up the rug!  He doesn't always feel excited about working on the house after a full work week, but it's SO worth it!!  He always gives me a hard time about my "projects", but he's always loved having them done!  Really, who wouldn't???

Now, if I could just keep things CLEAN around here......! LOL

That's the big news of the weekend!!  I HAD a post for last night almost finished, with pictures of the little projects I worked on this past week, but it's sitting in my drafts now because I had a marathon call from my sister Karen as she drove from Boston to New York at 11:30pm!! Haha!  When we finally hung up I couldn't keep my eyes open long enough to finish it! (it was close to 2am!) LOL  So I'll revise it for tomorrow or Monday, and add pictures of what we get done tomorrow on the floor.  I can't wait to show you those little projects, too!  It's funny, because only my blogging friends/followers would get excited about them like I do, but that's why I love blogging -- no one else GETS me but you guys!!! :-D

So, as my title says, I was doing my Happy Dance when we started the floor, but it was a little weird looking, I'm sure, because I kind of skip in place in a circle with my hands over my head, and I have a huge, squinty smile on my face.  I try not to add to the weirdo factor by making noise, but a couple of squeals definitely slipped out because I was SO excited!  I've been forbidden to DO my Happy Dance by my daughter (who's 14), so it's a good thing she was in her room at the time!!  She would have grabbed me and shaken me for sure! LOL

Tomorrow is Mother's Day, and before I go, I want to wish all of the mothers who read this a HAPPY MOTHER'S DAY!!!  And that goes for the mothers of fur babies too - they are just as special in my mind, especially since my sister Karen is one!! :-) 
I think being a mother is the GREATEST honor there is -- giving up yourself to another person/creature for their benefit, putting their needs above your own as often as necessary, with no tangible payoff, at least, no payoff that is considered valuable in today's society.  But in spite of what society tells us, I feel like WE have the greatest reward!!  Being a mother has been the greatest joy and blessing of my life!

I wish you all a joy-filled day tomorrow!!! ^-^