Weekend Update: Guest Bedroom Progress

Weekend update x 3 would be more appropriate for this title.  I held off on posting until I had some substantial progress worth reporting on.  No surprise, mudding takes a long time!  Then there is the sanding process, which is messy and time consuming.  Thankfully I am past that point with Bedroom #1 (aka, Jimmy’s new office), and the hallway space is small enough that I will knock it out this weekend.  

Over the past few weekends I was able to finish mudding the hallway area, prime and paint the office, rip up the old subfloor (and 500 nails), and install 90% of the new flooring in the office!  We had a radiator issue so I will be doing another coat of paint, but that will probably go right to the bottom of my to-do-list.  

Here is a quick reminder of what this room looked like before I started working on it…..

Take a look at this post to see the progress I made tearing down the wood paneling, and getting rid of that awful red carpet!  Then read below to see the progress from the past few weekends 🙂

With freshly sanded walls I was eager to prime and paint so I could see how I did with my first attempt at mudding.  Turns out, I did a decent job!  There is definitely room for improvement, but I’ll get there.

Check out this beautiful blue Jimmy picked out.  I cannot remember the name of this for the life of me, but I am very pleased with how it turned out!  Also, if you ever have the opportunity to paint without trim installed, do it!!!!  Painting goes so much quicker and you don’t have to worry about cutting in.  

After painting I spent a day pulling up the subfloor that was nailed and glued to the plywood layer of subfloor.  This was not a hard task, but pulling up the hundreds of nails that lined each sheet was tiresome.  Thankfully underneath was a nice clean, smooth, and level subfloor.  (sub-sub-floor?).  There was clearly some old water damage which is probably why they added the weird cardboard subfloor, but it is well dried out at this point.  

Given that there had been water damage in the past, and we are trying to maintain a budget here, we opted for a laminate wood look-a-like floor over a real hardwood.

I have to say, Laminate Hardwood is my new favorite product.  It is gorgeous and looks/feels like the real thing.  Jimmy and I worked together on this one and it was helpful to have a second set of hands.  The boards are long so we were able to each snap in a side.  The first couple of rows took some time, but once we got moving and had our pattern down, things went very quick.  

We went with the Pergo Outlast floor from Home Depot, in Highland Hickory.  We purposely chose one that had the foam underlayment attached, as we didnt want to deal with rolling an underlayment out.  I don’t believe it is much work, we were just really focused on getting this done quick.  

Here is a look at the floors going down!

Like I said, it was so easy!  Honestly, any one could manage this project.  It was helpful to have two of us, but it can be done with one person.  We did it over two days, but in total it probably took us 3 hours to do this room.  We lucked out with cuts, and everything fit conveniently.  However we still have to do that last 3 or 4 rows, which we will tackle this weekend.  There is one awkward cut that we have to make, and didn’t want to rush it when we were tired last weekend. 

Take a look at the almost finished floor!  I can’t wait to get back in there tomorrow and finish it so we can get the trim installed.  

It won’t be 100% finished this weekend, but with the floor down we can atleast get Jimmy moved from the dining room table to this space.  #LifeGoals

Thanks for checking in!  More to come soon 🙂