{ Cleaning Up }

While Mark's been working upstairs my main job has been to clean up around the rest of the house. You might have seen my post about cleaning the basement. It was the grossest area to clean and it still has a long way to go but the rest of the house is in pretty bad shape too and has needed lots of scrubbing. I figured I would give you a little update on how the living room looks now. 

Once we got it cleared out, I (using gloves) swept and scrubbed the floors three times. My bucket of water was black every 5 minutes. Seriously. Black. I lost count on how many times I changed out that bucket for clean water. It was a lot. It still amazes me that a floor could be that gross but, it was. Believe me. 

I didn't take a photo of the empty room before I started scrubbing. I think I was in to much of a hurry to get it cleaned. Above is a picture of it in the beginning stages of cleaning. My process was sweep, dry swiffer, sweep, wet swiffer, mop, mop, hands and knees scrubbing. I didn't want to get down on the floor until I was confident that most of the nastiness had been removed ha!

Here's a close up of the difference in how the floor looked with the first swiffer run through. It was amazing how "new" the flooring looked. Before I couldn't tell if the finish was in good shape or not due to the thick layer of dust/dirt/grim. But it looked pretty good. It will still need to be re-finished at some point though at least a couple coats of poly for sure. 

Oh, did you notice in the first picture that the random piece of paneling above the fireplace has been taken down. We decided we wanted to know what was behind it and what we would have to fix/replace. Well apparently it was covering a giant hole of brick, insulation and studs. Weird. 

This room has plaster walls so we will have to figure out how to patch that. I think we are planning on putting the t.v. up there. Not for sure yet though. 

So here is the beautiful result of lots of sweat and hard scrubbing! 

 Doesnt it look pretty darn good! I was excited. I even felt comfortable enough to put Chase's car seat on the floor! 

Here's a few more pictures for ya...

It feels so good to have one room cleared and cleaned! Can you see the new can lights in the last photo too?! There were no lights in this room except for that random old light that wasn't even in the living room space, so now that there are lights it seems like we are getting somewhere!

There's still lots to do in here. Obviously that huge spot needs to be patched along with a few other little spots that need some attention. Then cleaning the walls and painting them. So far a few things have been crossed off my list for this room and it feels good!

Living Room:

• clear out stuff and clean
• paint
• white wash the fireplace like this
• install a wooden mantel
• resurface the hardwood floors
• install ceiling lights