Have you ever placed a stack of boxes in a corner of a room, even a room that’s used all the time (like your bedroom, family room, kitchen, etc.) with a plan to move those boxes to their intended destination (storage, thrift store dropoff, friend’s house), and months later, those boxes are still there and you’ve become “blind” to them? It’s like you become so accustomed to seeing them there that you no longer think, “I really need to take care of those,” when you see them. They’ve become a fixture in the room that you glance right over, and it usually takes something like a visit from an out-of-town friend for you to “see” the boxes again and realize that they don’t belong there. I’ve done that. Several times.
Well, I don’t have a stack of boxes in the corner of a room that I overlooked, but I do have a big project that I overlooked when I was making my “to do” list for this year. And it’s a doozy. But it’s something that I’ve become so accustomed to seeing over the last few months that I looked right past it.
I’m talking about our floors. If you’ll remember, I stained and sealed the floors in our bedroom suite not once, but twice. The first time I did it, I stained them to match the floors in the rest of the house, so they were dark. Here’s what the bedroom floor looked like after that first round.
And here’s what the bedroom foyer looked like…
I had dreamed of having lighter floors, but I thought I had already locked myself into having dark floors because the rest of the house had dark floors. But after giving it some thought, I realized that if I wanted to change the color of the floors in our house, this was my opportunity. I needed to start in the bedroom suite, and I needed to get it done before I started moving furniture into the closet, foyer, and bedroom.
So I sanded down the floors again, and redid them in a light, natural color. I don’t have even the tiniest bit of regret over that decision. I absolutely love these light floors. I can’t even imagine our bedroom suite with dark floors. These light floors are perfect, in my opinion.
But my “stack of boxes in the corner of the room” that I’ve become so accustomed to seeing that I’ve become “blind” to it is this very clear line between the bedroom suite flooring and the rest of the house.
That looks terrible. But it hasn’t bothered me because in my mind, I’ve known that the plan is to lighten the floors in the rest of the house. There are five room/areas that have dark stained red oak floors that need to be sanded and sealed in order to make them look like the bedroom suite floors — the living room, music room, kitchen, dining area (sitting room), and pantry.
The main issue is deciding when the best time is to redo these floors. There are two issues I need to think about. I want to redo all of these floors at the same time rather than one room at a time. The first issue is that I’ll need a place to store all of the furniture while the floors are being redone. It seems logical that I should do the floors before I start on my workshop since my workshop is pretty large and fairly empty at the moment, so that would give me the perfect spot to move all of the furniture for storage while I’m redoing the floors.
But if I do that, that means that I’ll have to sand around the current kitchen cabinets.
And once I’ve done that, I’m kind of locked into keeping the exact same layout for the new kitchen cabinets that I want to build in the future. I’m not sure how I feel about that. Almost everything in the new kitchen will be in the same footprint as the current kitchen with the exception of the back wall of cabinets.
That’s the main change I have planned for the new kitchen. Instead of the lower and upper cabinets with a countertop, I want to do floor-to-ceiling storage on that wall, and I don’t plan to have a center part that juts out like I currently have. So I really need to think through this. I’m so tempted to just go ahead and do the floors soon after I finish the bedroom suite, but the kitchen seems to be my one roadblock.
One option would be to go ahead and remove those lower cabinets on that back wall, redo the floors, and then add some temporary storage along that wall until I get to my kitchen remodel. I could even go to Goodwill and purchase an inexpensive buffet or something like that to put against that wall. Or maybe there’s another solution that I haven’t thought of yet.
Either way, I need to figure out if there’s a way that I can get these floors done sooner than later. I just feel like right now, before I start working on my workshop, is the best time to take advantage of that big, free storage area that I have sitting in our back yard. Once that workshop is finished, I’ll lose out on that free storage, and I really don’t want to pay extra money for temporary storage.
Addicted 2 Decorating is where I share my DIY and decorating journey as I remodel and decorate the 1948 fixer upper that my husband, Matt, and I bought in 2013. Matt has M.S. and is unable to do physical work, so I do the majority of the work on the house by myself. You can learn more about me here.