Carpet!

Saturday the carpet was installed upstairs by Empire. Yes, that's who we ended up going with - and I am very pleased with the results and price. Of the 3 quotes I got for the job, Empire came in the lowest by far (WELL under $2,000, which the two other vendors told me would be impossible). The installation itself went smoothly - except it was incredibly noisy, completely freaking out both cats and sending them into deep hiding for the entire afternoon. Check it out:




Clearly I still have to put the molding back up in the master bedroom and it will look much nicer, but I'm waiting until it warms up a little more to haul all of it out to my parents' house to cut it down and restain.

I love what they did with the top of the stairs instead of reusing the gold threshholds:



All in all, I'm thrilled with the results and would definitely recommend Empire. Their installers were all nice guys, and called me up to consult on how they'd do the top of the stairs. I did manage to get some pics of the raw attic floor:

Re-carpeting the upstairs

So we got our first estimate from Carpet Vendor #1 last night to re-carpet the entire upstairs (the two bedrooms and the stairway landing area in between). I was pleasantly surprised that the estimate fell far below what I was expecting. We selected a polyester carpet that second to the nicest and most expensive polyester they carry, but it was made from recycled materials, so I'm all about supporting the green effort. And apparently the price of carpet has gone down lately due to the price of oil going down. Who knew?

The sales guy said we could easily carpet across and remove the thresholds (side note: for some reason I thought that word had two 'h's but Blogger is telling me otherwise) but keep the existing carpeting carpet on the stairs, which I don't really want to deal with at this point.

So two more quotes from other vendors on Saturday, and then I think we'll be good to go. Then no more fugly red/orange, and we can start thinking more about furniture.

Upstairs bedroom - painted!

Yesterday we finished painting the upstairs bedroom. All in all it turned out pretty well. Because I had a generous gift certificate from Home Depot from my parents for my recent birthday, we decided to go with Behr paint, and were generally pleased with the results. We used a very very light lavender/purple and did two thorough coats, which seemed to cover pretty well. Unfortunately I don't have any pics yet - I tried taking some last night but the color barely showed up in the room. Hopefully I'll get some good shots soon.

So now it's time to start getting quotes on carpeting the upstairs! I'm excited - it will be a tremendous improvement over the crappy red/orange shag that's currently up there.

In other home improvement updates, the shelves in the bedroom are finally up, thanks to the expertise of my father. Turns out that the hardware that came with the shelves just wasn't enough to hold them up sufficiently against a wall that's not entirely flat. Sometime this week I'll patch up and paint over the unsightly holes beneath the shelf on the right side.

Basically these shelves are in lieu of bulky nightstands that wouldn't fit so well in the space where we have the bed. I kind of like the minimalist thing we have going in the bedroom so far. We got some reading lights to mount to the wall from IKEA and I am quite happy with the results: