First step...fixing the floors

I was absolutely thrilled when we learned on the final site visit of the house that under that ugly, thin green carpet, there were original hardwood floors just waiting for some love from the Denton's. And by Denton's, I mean myself, Keith, Hal and Janet. It took a village! We began with ripping up ALL the carpet and padding throughout the hallway and the three bedrooms. I wish I would have taken a picture of how much we rolled up and put on our front curb. I love that Richardson has "bulky trash pick-up" every single Thursday so we took advantage of it almost on a weekly basis when first renovating our house. I had never tackled anything like this before since all I knew before owning a home was apartment life where I didn't have to do anything but clean. All it took was a lot of endurance and determination to get that ugly stuff out of the house. Below is a picture of the hallway with the carpet gone. You can still see the glue and paint everywhere which would magically disappear when the floors were refinished.

This is the middle bedroom (soon to be nursery) so we did the same thing here and just removed the carpet and hundreds and hundreds of staples. That tedious part took forever and once I finally thought I couldn't find any more staples, they would keep reappearing time and time again...

 Our garbage can served a wonderful purpose in keeping things clean and kept our feet safe so we wouldn't step on any of those tack strips.

 This is the guest bedroom in all her glory, minus the carpet. I guess I didn't like taking pictures of our master bedroom since I can't seem to find any until we started painting it.

Janet was a master with the hammer and crowbar in getting up all the tack strips that lined each wall. I would follow behind her with pliers and get out all the staples. I am still amazed how quickly she worked! My in-laws are amazing and never had a problem rolling up their sleeves and rushing to our house whenever we needed help with any projects. We still rely on them to this day and are so thankful we have Hal as a handyman we can always call on. They have both taught us so much!

A few days after ripping out all the carpet and tack strips, we had a minor emergency with Cason, our golden retriever. I was living at the house by myself (Keith and I weren't married yet) so one night, Cason comes inside the house and has almost severed his Achilles tendon on something sharp/possibly glass in the backyard. I rushed him to the animal emergency room and they had to put staples in his foot and gave him a huge bandage. The cone only lasted a few minutes before he managed to squirm out of it. Poor guy had a rough few weeks.

Doesn't he look so pathetic?