It's been way too long!!!

Oh my goodness...I knew it had been a WHILE since I blogged, but I didn't realize it had been almost a month! In my defense, I have been crazy busy remodeling the downstairs area of my house. It's a daylight basement with 2 bedrooms, full bath, laundry room and odd sort of common area.

It was also covered with old, tired berber carpeting. That carpeting looked great when first installed, but the cats have had their way with it over the years until it showed signs (both visual and olfactory) of too much clawing and "liquid immersion", shall we say.

Anyway, using my tax refund (some good financial news for a change!) I hired a handman recommended by Salvage Sisters Beth and Lisa who spent many an hour ripping out my old carpeting, taking up the tack strips, sanding the wooden stairs, removing the baseboards, replacing old light fixtures and painting areas I just couldn't get to.

I spent that same time painting the stairs leading down from the kitchen, painting woodwork (clean, crisp white), painting the stairwell and one bedroom (robin's egg blue), painting the laundry room (shiny white) and painting the common area (sage green).

Did I mention I did a bit of painting over this time? And cleaning and piling up stuff to get rid of and chasing the cats away from the paint...

One night I cleverly painted the stairs on my way down to bed thinking that they would dry overnight with only the random cat print. I did not count on having a massive asthma attack (from the new cat litter I poured out) and having to run upstairs to get my inhaler. I felt the paint squishing underfoot as I wheezed my way upstairs; when I got to my kitchen floor, I scrunched down the legs of my sweatpants to make impromptu slippers to cover my painted feet so I could walk without making huge trackmarks.

I sucked down enough albuterol to bronchodilate an elephant and then had the bright idea of putting plastic bags around my feet as I walked/sloshed backdownstairs, so that I could remove said bags when I got to downstairs. However, I quickly found that the surface tension between paint and plastic is such that the bags were sucked off of my feet after about 3 steps so I had to replicate my sweatpants-as-slippers maneuver to get to my bed. The next morning there were teeny little cat paw prints next to my size 9 imprints which was pretty amusing. Thank goodness that was just the primer; I learned to sequester the cats when I put the top coat on.

But the really, really, really big news is the new flooring I had installed. I originally toyed with the idea of painting or staining the concrete under the carpet for a funky faux look. Then I took one look at said concrete and realized it was way too bumpy and cracked and covered with discolored adhesive for that. So I looked into laminate flooring but found out my basement is "peaked" meaning that any rigid flooring would basically be "high centered" in certain spots. My options were rapidly dwindling unless I wanted to spend $$$$$ having my entire floor re-concreted which was not feasible. Then the wonderful sales person at the flooring store mentioned a linoleum product that looked a lot like wood that she thought I'd like.

When I first heard 'linoleum' I immediately had flashes of avocado shag rugs, harvest gold appliances and badly paneled basement rec rooms. But in to the store I went (covered with paint) to check it out and my to my surprise, I LOVED IT. I couldn't belive how much it resembled actual wood. And it was less expensive than the laminate, so I could afford to have my laundry room covered, too. Woohoo!

The guys who installed it were great...even though it took them WAY longer to repair the concrete that they had anticipated. As of last night, the baseboards were back on and I had touched up the paint around them and had gotten the boxes of stuff back into the correct rooms.

When I unpack my camera I will take and post some pictures. I absolutely love the new look...clean lines, soft colors, less clutter. Ahhhhhhh.

Which means that I will finally be able to get back into my studio and make things AND I will be able to get back to posting on my blog and working on the upcoming Salvage Studio Art Party!