The boy's bedroom

Remember the disgusting dog pee carpet photos from a while back on the post called PROGRESS?? Well, that carpet came out of the boy's room, and THAT project is what stalled my progress, and the reason nothing got updated for a long time here.

After pulling all that disgusting carpet and pad out, I let the floors dry out for a couple of days, then mopped them with a bleach solution. The room still smelled overwhelmingly like dog pee. The next step was to paint the floor with Kilz

I then let that dry for a couple of days while we looked at our budget and decided that new flooring simply wasn't in it right now. I thought about just painting the floor with porch and floor paint, which I've had luck with in the past, but decided that something a little more creative was in order. I set about searching Pinterest (THANKS, PINTEREST!!) for ideas, and decided to go with the paper bag floor. I'm sure you've all seen the post before- if not, search it out. I knew this process worked because my lovely sister in law had done this same project in her kitchen and it's held up quite well for a couple of years, even with kids and a large dog living in the house!



The next step, then, was to find a LOT of paper bags. I did my major grocery shopping trip and ended up with about 20 bags, which I figured would be enough. I tore them up into different sized pieces, and set about gluing them down using Elmer's Glue All. The bottle in this photo is extremely deceptive- I started with two of these bottles thinking it would be enough. I ended up going back and buying the huge, teacher sized gallon bottle.

Once I got all the bags glued down, I decided to go ahead and paint over it all with the porch and floor paint, since all the bags were not the same color and I didn't like the variation.

Of course, once that was done, I decided that the variation was actually BETTER than a sea of pukey brown (I let the boy pick the color, and it didn't turn out so well- I don't recommend camel beige for a floor!). That meant I had to start the process over- I went to the hardware store and bought a big pack of lawn and garden paper bags, tore those up, and started gluing again.

I then put polyurethane over the floor to give it a gloss and to protect the paper. Three days and six coats later, the floors looked fantastic!

We proceeded to move all of his furniture BACK into the room, and hang art and let him start living in there. Of course, you can't really SEE the floors that took me three weeks and hours of labor (a boy does live in there, after all), but the room no longer smells like rotting dog urine, and his allergies aren't driving him crazy any more. Here is how the room turned out when all was said and done.

As you can see, he's a huge Iron Maiden fan. He gets that from his dad, not from me.

Finished formal living room

I posted in progress photos of our formal living room when I was painting it, but now art is hung, the room is fully furnished, and it's all done! Here's how it turned out.