Making our house our home -- Part 1

We've been busy, busy, busy the last 2 weeks! Derk's mom flew in on a Wednesday, and the chaos began early Thursday. And it hasn't stopped since.

Thursday we went and bought the flooring. Then we came home and started ripping out the carpet in the dining room (who does that?!) and the linoleum in the kitchen and entry. It has been such a process. The builders apparently did a pretty rotten job of leveling the concrete, so Mom spent many hours leveling it out before we could lay the planks. She's pretty amazing and knows how to do everything! Well, maybe not everything, but I've never been able to come up with something she doesn't know how to do. :)

My house was trashed for a good 3 days. As you can see in this picture, my stove and dishwasher are in my living room (the dining room table and the 6 chairs are in there, too -- they were behind me when taking the picture), and then you can see past the kitchen where my fridge is in my laundry room. Which also meant I couldn't access the washer or dryer to do any laundry. I never thought I'd miss doing laundry, but I proved myself wrong! ;)

The kids had lots of picnics outside since we had nowhere to eat inside. We put the carpet remnant we ripped out of the dining room onto the back patio for a few days. They loved having picnics on the carpet. Asher is missing from this picture because he refused to get clothes on. . .

Derk, hard at work. He gives me this cheesy smile every time I ask him to let me take his picture. Go figure.

Cambria insisted on staying by my side pretty much the whole time. She desperately hates being away from me. I love that, don't get me wrong. But when ripping up flooring, using cement and trying to lay planks, it gets kinda rough having a 2 year old trying to help! ;) But she sure is a cute little helper!

Derk and Cambria taking a much-deserved rest on the new floor. I had to disturb their peace because they were laying where the fridge goes, and I was beyond desperate to have my laundry room back! :)

We also thought it was quite humorous that the laminate boxes said "easy installation". Nooooooot quite! I think it was a combination of many things, but this floor nearly did all of us in! If it hadn't cost half as much as hiring professionals, I would have been very tempted to skip the DIY. But now we have the pride of having a great floor that we did ourselves, I guess!