Backstory: we bought our house 3.5 years ago. When we bought it the builder granted us a $5,000 flooring allowance. We thought we were rich. We headed to the design house and started picking out the best flooring and our design expert told us the grand total would be $20,000. We quickly started to put everything back on the shelves. And went back to our builder and said what the heck, you said that would buy us the floors we wanted! It didn’t. So our sales assistant said we should just go with bare-bones flooring because any upgrades we do during the building process would increase the price of our home, thusly increasing the price we pay for property taxes every year. So we took the cheapest flooring option and really never thought about it again.
Until. Murray . You know Murray . He’s furry. A permanent fixture in our house. This is soooo embarrassing to admit. But Murray doesn’t like peeing in his kitty box as much as he likes peeing on the carpet. He’s a rebel. His doctor believes that he has chosen these two particular areas because that’s where people walk by the house a lot and he’s marking his territory. It’s gotten so bad that it can’t be cleaned anymore, and I haven’t had people over in months! I can’t believe I just told the internet that!
We’ve been trying to figure out for quite some time what we should do. Obviously replacing carpet with carpet would be rather stupid. Wood floors are EXPENSIVE. I wanted to just refinish the cement, I thought it would give a cool industrial look, but we nixed that idea. We finally settled on laminate flooring. Looks like wood, acts like wood, wants to be wood when it grows up. But even that was expensive! So we’ve just been waiting. Then last week we went to Home Depot to get some paint samples for my studio, and we walked up the flooring aisle and there were cheap, nice looking options! So we bought a carpet razor and went home. When we got home, Mike sat on the couch playing Mafia Wars (this is why he’s not actually allowed to have a real video gaming system in the house) and I took the carpet razor and started going to town on one section of the carpet. It was bad. Really really really bad. So we called up JP and said when can you get over here this needs to get taken care of ASAP. He came over the next day, assessed the damage, got to work the following day and lo and behold, our cat pee nightmares are now a distant memory!
Starting with the culprit himself…Murray enjoys laying on the new floors.
The living room BEFORE: (note: this picture was taken years ago, you can kinda see the carpet)
The living room DURING:
The living room AFTER:
The landing:
We ended up buying the flooring from Flooring 101 mainly because they actually had inventory in stock…what a revolutionary business practice.
Getting the floors re-done has re-invigorated my love affair with my house. The downstairs feels more open and welcoming. These pictures don’t show our coffee table/ottoman that we’ve had for awhile because we need to get little felt safety pads on the bottom of it so it doesn’t scratch up the floors. And also, I have to consider getting a rug, I know it’s traditional to get a rug in the living room to define the area, but I love the floors so much I don’t know why I would want to cover most of it up! And the dining room still needs some work so I’m not showing that for now, but I will because it’s the most awesome shade of……… 
by Amanda
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