Flooring Flashback

*Warning: This is a semi-long post as it has a story that goes along with it!*

I thought I'd take a little walk down memory lane today and show you all a major DIY project that hubby and I took on two summers ago, before hubby was my hubby, in fact we weren't even engaged yet but I must have really loved him to do all of this work. Anyways, at the time Cody was living in the house with 5 other guys...yep, that's right...6 boys in a 3 bedroom house. Quite amazingly the big DIY project that we took on was not because of Cody's roommates. It was because of this pretty little pond that sits in the field behind our house...

 

Here's Molly playing in that pond...

 And here's that pond just a few weeks ago surrounded by the beautiful snow.

You see in the Spring of 2008, Mansfield had somewhat of a freak rain/thunder/hail storm (if you haven't noticed or didn't know, Texas often has a lot of weird/freak weather). We're talking hail piled so high in the streets that you weren't even able to drive in some of them. On top of the hail, many streets in Mansfield also flooded and looked something like a raging river. Well, with the massive amounts of rain this little 5 to 6 foot deep pond overflowed right into the backyard. It was very strange because the pond is at least 20 to 30 feet away from our back fence, but when our backyard flooded so did the entire house. There wasn't a section of carpet in the entire house that wasn't soaked. Anywhere you took a step water squished out. Not good. 

We did some major investigating into our carpet and other possible flooring options. We first thought we'd hire a carpet cleaning company to get all of the water out and properly clean the carpets but were told that there would be no way that the carpet and the padding underneath hadn't or wouldn't mold. So we ripped up the carpet and looked into staining the concrete floors until we realized how many paint stains were on on the concrete from when the house was being built. Finally we looked into wood laminate flooring. We called several companies and got their estimates...we were looking at around $6,000! No thank you. So Cody did some research, we bought a book on how to do laminate flooring, borrowed some tools and off we went to do the floor all by ourselves! It was a lot of hard work and a long summer but we had a lot of great help from some friends along the way and in the end we had an entire house done in wood laminate for only $2,000! Here are some pictures from the DIY...

Cody and one of his firefighter buddies working on the floor in the living room.

 Flooring in the dining room. Check out that nasty wallpaper...yes, we took that down too!

I promise I was actually working, but someone had to take the pictures!

See, there I am!

And there are the finished floors! This picture is still from before I moved in, but we still have that giant "L" couch. I have a love/hate relationship with it.

As you saw from the pictures, the pond is still behind our house but since then something of a retaining wall has been built behind our back fence and we got flood insurance just in case! I hope all of you enjoyed the pictures of my biggest DIY project thus far. :) Have a great weekend!