Update - First floor

We've spent most of our time and resources fixing up the first floor which includeds the living room, playroom/office, bathroom, kitchen and dining room. The biggest change we made is to the floors. The playroom/office had a pretty ugly brick pattern linoleum floor (you can see it in a couple of the pictures in our flickr album). The living room had very old tiles, most likely asbestos. The dining room had an old dirty red carpet and the kitchen, which was updated fairly recently, had a tile floor we weren't crazy about. Rather than having a company come in and test living room floor and do an asbestos abatement, we put the new floor down right on top of it - a perfectly safe alternative. We took up the dining room carpet and kitchen tiles and found the subfloor to be in pretty good shape. The new floor went down right on top. We opted to go for 4" wide hickory flooring. It's a different look than oak or pine, and it's a much harder wood - which will certainly stand the test of time with our kids growing up in the house. There are a few pictures of the old flooring being removed and the new flooring being installed in the flickr album. I don't have any pictues online yet of the wood in it's finished state, but trust me it looks fantastic.

In addition to the flooring, I replaced the living room ceiling. The existing ceiling was tiled and not in good shape. Several tiles were loose and falling. Rather than try to find tiles that matched the existing, I tore down the tiles and put up sheetrock - a much cleaner look. The walls in the playroom/office were also redone. We took down the pine panelling and patched the sheetrock/plaster walls. As I mentioned earlier the kitchen was renovated fairly recently thus the walls and ceilings did not need any fixing up.

After the walls and ceilings were fixed up, we had the entire first floor received a new coat of paint. The only areas not painted were the bay windows in the living room and the staircase in the living room. I'm going to have to replace all of the stair treads and the handrail posts, so it didn't make any sense to have that painted if I'm going to be removing it anyway. The crown molding and base molding is not finished yet, so there are no pictures of the completed finished first floor project. Expect to see pictures and an update within the next couple of weeks.