April 5

Today has been a long, exhausting day; but it's also been a lot of fun!

My mom came over around 9:45 this morning and Chris and I began tearing out flooring in our dining room.

Caleb didn't get to take part in the demolition, but he was excited to try on my new safety goggles.

(In the background: old hardwood flooring, which looks deceptively nice. It wasn't nice at all. Also in the background: faux wood paneling that had been painted with layers upon layers of white paint. Spoiler: both are gone now.)

Chris and I found a groove pretty quickly, and within an hour and a half we had torn out the wood floors. Hooray!

We were pretty pleased with our progress.

Stage one: flooring gone, paneling remains.

Hours later, we reached stage two: flooring gone, paneling gone. We took our dining room down to the studs, people. 

I always thought that the home improvement shows were edited to create suspense, and that sometimes the "surprises" or setbacks were engineered. WRONG. We had a few surprises and setbacks, too, including some rotted subfloor and discovering that our brick fireplace hearth actually sits on top of the wood flooring. So to remove the flooring, we have to tear the fireplace apart. 

Really.

I think we'll just cut around it instead.

All of this progress was made possible by my wonderful mother, who spent nearly twelve hours caring for our children today. She's kind of fantastic.

She also brought pansies for me to look at and for Lily to play with.

Perhaps if we have another daughter down the road, we should name her Pansy?

Or maybe not.

In an effort to continue making progress, Chris and I had pizza delivered for dinner.

I cannot remember ever, in the course of our nearly twelve years of marriage, having pizza delivered. But we did tonight, and it was totally worth it. We all crammed around the kitchen table and devoured it. 

Then Chris and I got back to work, and Mom got back to entertaining the children.

By bedtime, this was our view. 

Flooring gone, paneling gone, wall gone. 

Tomorrow, we're hoping to pull up the 8 million nails in the floor, cut out the wood flooring around our fireplace hearth, add insulation (that wall you're looking at separates the dining room from Daisy's room. The room is actually supposed to be a family room, but we felt like noises from conversation, TV, and squeaky floors always traveled right through the walls, so we repurposed it into a dining room. Just in case we ever want to switch it back to a family room, we're putting some noise-dampening insulation in the walls.), and hang drywall.

We'll see how much of that we actually get done!