Up to, and the MOVE!

I know it's been a while since I've posted. There's been a lot going on, some good, some bad, but....we're IN.

I'll start with where we were on my last post. (Hope you're all ready for a marathon here!)

The floors turned out partly gorgeous, partly a disaster. 85% of our house is this beautiful quarter sawn red oak. Patrick at Circa gave me his mix of Special Walnut and Jacobean which we loved and this part of the floors turned out really well. Well, they took MUCH much longer to dry than we were told, meaning the move ended up being kind of a cluster. However, moving on...we do like the floors in the majority of the house.

Pics of the finished oak floors:

Dining room into Living room

Den (still waiting on a new backdoor)

The other 15% of our kitchen/wine bar/ laundry area, however, is another story. The mix did not translate well at all onto the old pine of our kitchen floors. Many people love the rustic look of pine however we feel it was a real oversight on our part to not have replaced it with the oak in the rest of the house. We really aren't happy at all with how they stained. To me it looks like a zebra died on our floor — the pattern is just way too much with the pattern already happening in our island and on our cabinets.

Kitchen floor mess

More

So where do we go from here? Panic ensued for 24 hours.  Mainly b/c you really can't easily replace floors once your cabinetry is in. I looked into painting them, but it doesn't last more than a few years. Then finally I found the guy that the 3 people I asked all told me about – David Purser Floors. Talking to him was such a different experience than the first floor guy I used, who balked even at a special mix. This second guy does nothing BUT special mixes, vegetable dyes, oils, chemical treatments, etc. I immediately liked him and even though we are out of budget, we plan to re-do the kitchen floors. David mixed several options for us for what might work well on the pine floors - although he showed me some beautiful samples (below), I think we might go for ebonizing them (black). Even though ebonizing will be a huge pain to upkeep, it will look the best with our style.

Ok so after that decision was made, and the floors finally dried, we moved :) For those that don't know, this was our third move of 2011 and add one more if you're including 2010. We have moved so many times trying to get to this final point of "home" in Charlotte that we know our moving crew here now. I am a really high-strung mover and Chris from Easy Movers is the man, he always takes good care of our stuff. You know you've moved a lot when you hug the movers when they show up.

There was a lot of this - boxes never even unpacked from Los Angeles

There's a red sticker for every move that Mike's vinyl has made

Us with Chris from Easy Movers. (We're going to miss Chris – but not enough to call him to move us again anytime soon)

My mom — and even my 90-year old grandmother showed up to help unpack!

My sister hard at work in the laundry room

The truck leaving - yeah!

The day we said goodbye to Chris from Easy Movers was also the day we said goodbye (albeit only temporarily) to our crew Irwin and Alan, who work with my Dad. They will be back in 2 weeks, but for now we are on our own...

Alan and Irwin (Dad not pictured)

 Before they left, they got the hood in, and the glass backsplash in, and the washer + dryer hooked up.

Kitchen with backsplash, which was it's own story, but has a fabulous ending....

And completed hood (ignore cat and beer on counter!). We love how the cooktop and wall oven built into the cabinet turned out. And we are SO.GLAD. we weren't talked into surrounding the hood with cabinets!

Washer + dryer with the house's original kitchen cabinets installed above them. We had to keep a little token!

The guest bath got it's mirror behind the wall-mount faucet. Love how it turned out:

What did NOT get done was the master bath shower – lesson learned: get nothing installed the week after Xmas, because the B-list crew is on staff. They broke the shower when it came in (and damaged our new tile on the way out) so our master still is without glass (but otherwise pretty!):

The air duct cleaning finally happened, too, and we definitely needed it after pounds of construction material were dropped down our ducts. For those local to Charlotte, Fresh Air Technologies is highly recommended in my book. They spend a good 9 hours cleaning our system (and weren't paid hourly!)

Duct cleaning truck

Hooking into the crawl space

So, I sign off VERY glad to be in, (very glad to be out of our temporary apartment) breathing clean air, with one working shower, still amidst boxes, and needing to order window shades tomorrow (I have packing paper covering our windows with painter's tape), and a couple of rugs soon.

More fun furnishings news to come this week....Happy New Year to all!