After finding out that we had a false ceiling in the kitchen and spending this weekend putting up plasterboard and generally getting very excited about how the kitchen is shaping up, I had no idea the house wasn’t done rewarding us for our hard work just yet.

I’ll go into more detail about the kitchen in a later post and share our progress but I had to tell you about the most recent gift the house has bestowed upon us.

Yesterday, W was putting up the plasterboard in the kitchen with one of his very kind workmates who came around to give us a hand and he went upstairs to mark out where the kitchen lighting is going to go. The beauty of these old houses is that everything is pretty much accessible so all it takes is lifting up a few floorboards upstairs and you can see the ceiling of the floor below.

When W came back down the stairs he said to me, “What kind of flooring do you want in your dressing room?”

“Why?” thinking it was an odd time to be planning flooring for that room when we’re in the midst of chaos for our kitchen remodel.

“Do you want wood flooring?” he asked.

“Um. Yes….”

“Well, you’ve got it. Go have a look.”

When I got upstairs this is what I saw.

Now you may be wondering why the hell I never looked under the carpet in this room before.  And I’ll tell you – it’s because I couldn’t get the carpet up.  It had been glued around the edges right to the floor and as I knew the flooring in the master bedroom under the carpet was unfinished, I kind of assumed (I know, I know) that this room would be the same.

So it seemed a bit pointless to try to rip the carpet up (which could have very well been glued to anything, including hardboard or concrete or anything else) so I never bothered, I just assumed when the time came, we’d be replacing the flooring.

Well, once I saw that,  I had that room cleared out faster than you could say FINISHED WOOD FLOORS.

I pulled the entire carpet up, vacuumed and put everything back in while the guys finished up downstairs.  It was all very exciting and I’m sure I was lifting heavy things above my head with minimal effort due to the surges of adrenaline I was feeling.

But before I show you what the room looks like now, let me remind you what the incredibly manky carpet looked like previously.

Here’s what the room looked like the day after we moved in.

And here’s what the room looked like back in July…

Note manky carpet as well as unpacked boxes…

And this is what it looked like once the room was cleared out (in my excitement, I moved the clothes horse back in before picking up the camera)…

Pablo was checking himself out in the mirror.  Well, it IS the dressing room.

And here’s what it looks like now…

There’s a bit of wear in the centre of the room as there would be with older flooring but I am considering now getting a cute rug which will hide that.  I also have yet to get my Ikea shelving units which will free up all the boxes of clothes and shoes that you can see piled up.

The room looks so much brighter now with the floors.  Bear in mind there is SO VERY MUCH to do in here.  I talked a little bit about my inspiration for the room long ago in this post but my ideas have evolved a bit since then.

I spoke previously about wanting to replace that chest of drawers with something slightly bigger and change the mirror above it. There is also the messy job of stripping the existing wallpaper, fixing whatever we may find underneath that and re-wallpapering (not sure which wallpaper yet, I’ve changed my mind about 20 times).  I just know that as this is a dressing room (and MY dressing room at that – W keeps his clothes in the master bedroom wardrobe), I really want something INCREDIBLY feminine. 

Some of the boxes have been covered with a spare bit of fabric  because I got tired of looking at them!

I wanted to put more shelves up above the clothes rail but the wall there is a bit crumbly so previous attempts to hang things there didn’t work out which is why we added a shelf above the chest of drawers and a shelf above the full length mirror. 

So yeah, lots to do but I can’t tell you how much of an improvement those floors have made to the room and the best part is the cost.  F-R-E-E baby!

Now those are the kinds of before and afters I like.