The bang of a hammer and nail gun, that is.
Having finished the larger guest bedroom in November, this New Year’s holiday we undertook the smaller guest room’s makeover – the goal being to be (mostly) finished with both guest bedrooms by 2013, making way for the much bigger master bedroom/bath makeover planned for 2013.
Like the other room, this included painting and putting in a hardwood floor. First up: getting the furniture that was in there out. Which involved moving a big ass Ikea bookcase. It was a heck of a lot easier getting it IN than getting it out (it came unassembled, of course). I will say this: that bookcase is built to last – unlike some Ikea stuff. It’s also a heavy sucker! Once we wrestled that monster downstairs it was time to rip up the carpet and padding then on to the really fun part: hunting for all of the staples in the floor. For this room we wisely used knee pads (in the other room we didn’t and had sore knees for a week or so afterwards). We also got to break out the nail gun again, which, it turns out, is really fun (though I have to throw all of my weight into it to get it to effectively nail anything. And when the air compressor goes off, I still jump two feet). I may yet master the use of a hammer! Finally, we replaced the door frame and the baseboards and all of the electrical outlets. Classy!
Along with all of this cosmetic stuff we also did a bunch of bed swapping. In the master bedroom we decided to downsize to a queen from the ginormous Cal King that we’ve had for about ten years (and by ginormous, I mean ginormously tall – the thing sat about three or more feet off the floor and our poor old dog Mia needed a staircase to get on it). The bed also had developed a distinct slop into the middle and I admit that I fell victim to Sit n Sleep’s )very effective) gross-out commercials about what happens to aging beds (check this out to see what I mean: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K-eY0RYiy00). Taking advantage of year end sales we went a little overboard and got a Serta iComfort memory foam bed with an adjustable base. This puppy has a massage setting and can adjust the head and foot to all sorts of comfy positions. It even has a remote control! We then decided to replace out guest bed with a memory foam mattress too, since everything was on sale. And to help combat the return of the dust mites we upgraded our mattress pads to Celliant pads.