Dining Room - Glorious After

 This is the garbage produced.

 Inspired to clean by the beautiful floor!

Dining Room - During

 Day One

Our friends EdgyK and her husband Stenny helped us.  Without their help we would have gone nutz and it would have taken a LOT longer.

 I am being useful here, it just doesn't look like it.  Haha  I was dictating measurements while EdgyK marked the laminate.  (Blogger loaded these pics all jumbled up.)  Here you can see we were nearly done with the kitchen.  The kitchen took a long time because of all those corners we had to measure around.

M discovered the advantages of a wood floor.

Here is the picture of how far we got the first day.  We finished the kitchen.  We had friends coming over that evening, and EdgyK had a family party to attend, so we stopped around 5pm.

M and E used the boxes as coffins.  My kids are so morbid.  They did a mummy exhibit and drew bodies inside the coffins.

When everything got ripped up, we discovered there was a half-inch difference between the dining room and the kitchen.  Mr N had to run to the store and get some boards to even things up.  This set us back about two hours.

 Here is E being a mummy.  Apparently mummy = zombie without a hunger for brains.

Day Two

Day 2 dawned bright and early.  It was New Years Eve and Stenny & EdgyK showed up at 8am to floor the dining room.  That's earrrrrrly in case you were wondering.

 After the kids got bored with the mummy exhibit of Day 1, they turned the boxes of Day 2 into a tepee.

 Okay so admittedly I did not work as hard as Mr N, EdgyK, or Stenny.  I was on baby duty a lot.  It's its own form of hard work!  Day 2 while the baby was napping it was me, EdgyK and Mr N on floor duty while Stenny was our cutter.

 

Mr N picked up a set of laminate installation tools on a whim during his trip to Home Depot on Day 1 and they turned out to be VERY useful.  The dining room was much faster to floor due to its large rectangular shape.  We finished laying laminate around 1pm and Stenny stayed and helped Mr N nail all the baseboards back on.  They were done around 2pm.

Dining Room - Before

 Between Christmas and New Years, Mr N had the entire week off.  At the top of a very short "Honey Do" list was ripping out the carpet of the dining room and cheap laminate of the kitchen and replacing it with the highest quality wood laminate we could afford.  Look at that nasty carpet!  Naturally we didn't bother vacuuming before snapping this pic.

I snapped this picture in case Mr N didn't feel like smiling at the end of the project.

Here's a picture of the laminate in the kitchen.  Mr N had already pulled the fridge out.  Sorry the lights in the kitchen are pretty yellow.  There was nothing major wrong with the laminate; there were several small holes and dings in it and there was discoloration in the entire center where we walk around.

Updates to the Kitchen

Our dishwasher has been dying a slow death for about a year now. We were planning to replace it with some tax refund money. About a week before Thanksgiving, our oven suddenly popped loudly. The stovetop worked, but the oven was completely out. The replacement part was nearly as costly as a new oven, so it was time to head to Lowe's. They were having a pre-Black Friday sale, and the prices were great, so we got an oven and a dishwasher! They are so pretty. And they both work. So, you know, yay!