Luckily this room had no wallpaper (score!), unluckily it had 40 year old avocado green wool carpet (which the previous owner, bless her heart, thought added a lot of value to the home). When we were buying the house, I peeked under the carpet and knew there was oak hardwood... what I didn't know was that the underpad was essentially glued down to this hardwood... what a mess.
Here is what it looked like when we viewed the house:
It's a very long and narrow room.
First thing was first, we painted the ceiling white, which immediatelly made the space feel fresher and brighter.
Then we primed and painted.
I used Benjamin Moore's Acorn Yellow on the 3 main walls, Hedgehog Brown on the wall behind the fire place as an accent wall (I plan on putting one of our TV's up there). I painted the fire place white using brick paint. I left the space at the top to do a kind of faux moulding, where we'll put a small piece of trim and pant it all out.
With the painting done, we had to tackle the floors. What a chore.
This is actually the upstairs hallway but gives a good idea of how stuck this underlay was in the high traffic areas.
Glue Buster- worst idea ever. Look at the mess it made:
So after I scraped off what I could.. I called someone in to give us a quote on refinishing the hardwood. Apparently I left this a bit too late as it takes 10 days with drying time to do it properly (with 4 coats of poly)... and this was about 10 days before we were slated to move in. OOPS.
I convinced the guy to start the next day, and it turned out so nicely.
I opted to go for 1/2 walnut 1/2 natural stain with a satin finish on top.
This is the finished result. We still have some work to do on the trim, putting up art or our TV, and we need to figure out a furniture arrangement we can live with, but It sure looks a LOT better! I can't beleive they covered up this beautiful hardwood! The man who refinished it said some of the boards went almost the entire length (18ft) of the room!
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