The Whyte House: surprise diy.

friday there was a little mishap in our house dealing with vaseline. i'm sure i don't have to name name's and tell you who's little hand was in it, but i will anyway.

aiden.

the boy had dumped his trash can over, stood on it and pulled the vaseline that we'd been using on his dry and cracked little face, off his dresser to have a party with it.

let me start with the positive and say that his wal-mart brand vaseline smells really good and i didn't mind having to smell it throughout the house.

the negative, however, is that he smeared it all over his bedding.
ALL OVER the back of his door... over 3/4ths of the humidifier.

and of course, all on his carpet.

which brings us to the point of this post.

we hate our carpet. loathe it, really. it's a big reason i hate having company over. we've been hating it for 7 years, but haven't had the extra cash to replace it.

despite my mom's tips on how to get vaseline out of the carpet, i really didn't want to even attempt to clean it. i didn't want it cleaned. i wanted it out of my house. i had showed justin ashley's post about how she removed her carpet and painted her subfloor. i figured he'd just say, "absolutely not" and that'd be it. however, we priced everything out and so far we've spent about $70(we did have some rollers and supplies already, so we didn't have to buy everything) as opposed to a lot of dough that we'd have to fork over for new carpets that would just be trashed by the boy again. when you're saving for a big road trip to washington state like i am, $70 is a huge relief.

we now have a painted floor.
i. like. it. a. lot.
as does he.

some things we didn't think about when removing this carpet:
you always forget about the major echo and noisy floor. i'm sure once everything is back in his room the echo will die off. we also have some rugs that will be making their way into his room to help with the sound. that and the new "no shoes allowed" rule will also help(i can just hear my daughter tap dancing on it now). we also didn't think about his door. his door closes easier without the carpet. and there's now a large gap underneath for ventilation. since his humidifier runs 24/7 these days, it will be nice to have proper ventilation in his room.

and no more water streaks on his wall.

now on to the photos. :)

we first had to move everything out of aiden's room. his bed, clothes from his closet and laundry basket went to emily's room.
his dresser, red table and curtains went to the living room. wall/dresser decor to the hall closet. thankfully, his room doesn't have a lot of stuff in it to begin with. since he chews on things during bedtime, we have never been able to really keep anything in his room that wasn't clothes, sleeping accessories or higher placed decor. i don't even put his shoes in his room anymore because he's been known to chew on those!

(the photos all look terrible...i used my 18-55mm lens and it doesn't do well with bad light. however, it has the power to zoom and i can get a lot more in the shot with it!)

friday night we took out all of the carpet/pad. i say "we", but really i just yelled at kids to move out of daddy's way while he did all the grunt work. i'd rather help than yell, but we didn't have anyone to deal with kids.

all the tack strips and staples were removed friday night, while saturday morning was filled with hammering nails further in, filling holes and gaps with bondo(my new friend), sanding, priming and painting the first coat of porch paint. we decided to do things a little different than ashley's. first, this is a kids room...they throw up, sneak things in their rooms that could spill, and we have a dog. we decided we needed to prime the floor. we will sand over the first coat of porch paint--ashley's post mentions why(i thank her for mentioning it since we never knew that), we will apply a second coat and we will be putting 3 coats of polyurethane on top. ashley did an awesome stencil, but let's face it, unless i'm stenciling something to do with toy story on his floor, aiden's not gonna care for it. skipping the stencil, we just want his floor super coated to deal with any wetness. we have to wait 24 hours to apply a second coat of porch paint. once all of the poly is on, we will have to wait 72 hours before to really even move anything in his room and a few more days after that to add any rugs. well worth it, though.

if you do something like this, just know that porch paint doesn't really come in an abundance of colors. we had dark gray, light gray and red. i'm happy with our light gray selection, though the color on the can looks a lot lighter than it is on the floor. just fyi.