You can bet your life is pretty chill when the most exciting thing that happens to you over the course of a few days is getting a brand new super vacuum. I don’t know what the normal life span of a vacuum cleaner is, but Javi and I have been using a standard canister vacuum from Bed, Bath and Beyond since we got married and we finally caved and bought a super fresh and beastly vacuum that banishes allergens (read: has magical powers) from Dyson. I never thought I’d be making monthly payments on a cleaning machine, but here we are – fighting the losing battle against doggo hair with new-and-improved weaponry. Anyway, it arrived just in time to clean up the monstrous mess we made in our guest room after removing the carpet. It turns out we were lucky when we removed the carpet in our bedroom and found decent hardwood. The wood floors beneath the guest room carpet are not in bad shape; they’re in no shape at all. We figured if we can’t afford to replace them and they’re not going to get any worse, maybe we’ll try to paint them!

pictured above – our old, worn out vacuum. RIP.

I know I said I preferred scuffed up floors to carpet, but this is a little extreme.

We removed the carpet and staples, then brought out our dear old friend the corded palm-sander (my first power tool!). Javi spent the whole day sanding the floor while I vacuumed in his wake. If you ever try this, make sure to cover your entire house in plastic, Dexter-style. We thought closing the door would do it, but our entire main floor was covered in the dust of our labor. Good thing we have a nice vacuum. Before you chide us for not renting a drum sander, I’ll have you know I read two whole blog posts from other people about painting floors and all that’s necessary for a paint job are 100-grit sand sheets. In all seriousness, we need to keep this project on the cheap and since we aren’t worried about ruining the floors we figured we’d try out what we already have available, since we literally have no other options. On to the fun part…

Painting. Well, like I said, we aren’t currently spending money on anything outside of what we already have, so the floor paint will have to wait. We closed our guest room door after we sanded and vacuumed many times over, and closed it will stay until we go out and get paint to finish the job. Hopefully that’ll be soon, but in the meantime we moved on to other paint projects. Before we moved in we painted our whole main floor, but the basement remained the same dark gray that coated the house when we bought it. We purchased the paint previously but didn’t have the time to tackle the basement until this weekend (so much alliteration!), so we taped it up, moved the furniture to the middle of the rooms and went to it. We still don’t have any of the furniture or decor that we want for these rooms, but the before/after is such an enormous relief. I feel like we’ve been painting forever, but the work of a couple of days makes an enormous difference in this house.

Our Nashville house had dark, bold colors. We used a midnight blue in the guest room, sundried tomato red in our living room, and two dark browns for accent walls. We decided to go light and airy in the new house, so we used four different shades of white from Valspar for the whole house: Foggy Skies, Summer Gray, Apricot Haze and Quail Egg. They hardly differ from each other except for slight hints of gray, yellow and pink in each one, but the difference is stark depending on the natural light and contrast with the furniture. I love how they all turned out, and I feel like the light, plain colors leave us with a blank slate for going crazy with decor. My next project is to repaint all of our photo frames gold for the walls downstairs someday after tour, which starts on Friday. Here we go…