Tearin' up Carpet and Takin' Names.

Chris did amazing things back home while I was gone.  He took such great care of Greta and spoiled her with multiple trips to the park a day.  He also fixed kitchen sink that has been leaking since we moved in, removed the reverse osmosis water filter so our water dispenser on our fridge wouldn't be so sluggish, AND fixed the toilet in the master bath that we have had to manually flush (aka put our hand in the tank. ew.) for months.  It felt like Christmas coming home.  He didn't snap any photos of those projects, but this morning, I jumped right back into work and ripped out the old carpet in the soon-to-be studio:

Ta-daa!!

I still have to remove the tack strip around the edges and vacuum up all the carpet pad debris, but I am so grateful to be rid of that carpet.  We mentioned a couple weeks ago that we weren't quite sure what we were going to do about the floor.  The FLOR carpet tiles that you voted on will be a great area rug that will cover most of it, but we were hoping to lay some laminate wood down underneath. You can read in this post about our wish to find a match for the flooring that was leftover in our shed.  Update on that--no dice.  We brought a section to lumber liquidators, even though we knew the flooring was discontinued, to hopefully get a good match.

The guy working there was so helpful and measured the depth of our flooring and showed us some close matches.  The bad news--he also explained to us that no flooring would actually connect with our existing laminate so we would have to join them with transitions.  That's when we scratched that idea because that would look crazy, not to mention the slight bumps of the transitions would feel crazy underfoot.

We started talking about buying hardwood flooring just for this room.  After all, we plan on replacing all the laminate downstairs eventually anyway.  The worker discouraged us, explaining if we don't buy it all right now--we could run into the same problem when we're ready to re-floor the main floor.  It could be discontinued.  All of this discouragement was actually to our benefit because we weren't putting ourselves in a bad situation down the road and we were able to come up with a different idea:  Work with the subfloor.

Type "painted subfloor" into Google or even Pinterest and the examples are outstanding.  Granted, we aren't planning on doing any detailed stenciling or crazy colors--but now we have the confidence we needed to know painting the subfloor is the perfect temporary solution for this room.

....and now you know how I am spending the rest of my day.  What are you up to?  Are you down for painted subfloors?

P.S.  We have fallen behind in our votes for the Exterior Melodrama.  I blame my absence.  Click here to cast your daily "Love it" vote.  It only 2 seconds.