I been waiting for this for the last 7 years . . .

. . . it's NEW CARPET!!

Yes, I know that that may not seem so exciting to you guys but trust me, if you were living with pink carpet, you'd be happy too!!

This is the before pic of the familyroom. We actually had replaced the pink carpet in this room about 5 years ago-since it was so badly stained. This carpet actually wasn't that bad, but the quality of it wasn't that great, and I just wanted all the carpet downstairs to match. Notice the two clean rectangular spots where my couches were? Nice.

Moving along on the tour, here is the horrible, 20-year-old pink carpeting I was talking about-just in case any of you haven't had the priviledge of seeing it in person. This is the stairway. The first thing you see when you walk in the front door:

And just to the right of the entry way is our living room:

Ripping up the old carpet. Goodbye! I won't be missing you!

(Sophee decided she needed to take this picture of the carpet guy. I'm sure he was thrilled being photographed on the job) You see all the spots on the picture? No that's not a dirty lens, it's 20 years of dirt being released:

We had issues trying to figure out what to do with the piano. The only way to get it out of the room would be to take the legs off and put it on a special board on it's side. Meaning, we needed a piano mover. Unfortunately, the guy who moved the piano in for us 7 years ago was no longer in town, and there are no other piano movers near here. I was beginning to think that I'd have to call someone to come down from Vegas and pay a big chunk of change to have them hang out here for half the day just to move it. I called my piano tuner (in Kingman) out of desperation, to see if he knew of anybody that could help us out. He said there was no one around here, but suggested that we could probably just get a bunch of guys and have them lift it and move it to one side of the room, while they carpeted the other side-then vice versa. Thankfully, the room is big enough, so that's what we ended up doing.

First off, the guys moved the piano right up to the window on one side of the room. That was the easy part, as it only had to be moved a few feet, and it only had to be 'barely lifted' as to take the weight off the legs:

So the carpet guys laid the carpet on the opposite side, and stretched it into place. Then they rolled it all the way up to the legs of the piano. Now for the fun part!! The guys had to lift the piano up about 6-8 inches off the ground, over the new carpet, and completely across the 23 feet of livingroom! We had 6 guys lifting, and judging by all the groaning they were making, I'm sure the piano was extremely heavy!! This is the best picture I could get, as I didn't want to get in their way:

And here is the finished product!! The familyroom:

*It's kinda hard to tell the difference here, but it's slightly darker than the previous carpet, and much softer!

It's a cut-pile berber. I just call it the 'shaggy' stuff. Here's the stairway:

I decided to take advantage of the fact that the piano was already on the other side of the room and rearrange things. Since our living room is very long and narrow, I created a little 'hallway' of sorts with the couch when you first walk in-since we had plenty of room to spare. Here it is (this is to the right of the front door) I'm still in the process of decorating. Don't judge me:

Looking in from the opposite of the room:

Another angle:

Awww, it's a thing of beauty. Even if my husband was cursing it during the move across the room:

(Hey, he was the one who insisted on the baby grand when we went piano shopping!)

I am so thrilled with the new look!! Now the only pink carpeting left downstairs is the diningroom, which I plan to rip out soon. Since we plan on tiling that room, I'm just going to paint the cement until we're ready to do that.

And lest you think I might miss that lovely pink carpeting, don't worry, we still have it in the bedrooms upstairs. UGH! Well what can you do?? It will have to wait until we have thousands of dollars just laying around in the bank.