Our new UPSTAIRS!!

The flooring and walls upstairs are FINISHED! Ok, I still need to do floor molding and do some touch-up work. There's also the issue of building a better sub-wall around the stairwell. But that can be done. For right now, let's focus on the floors and walls and look at the improvement!

Here's the before. Ignoring the corgi carnage, there was bad, yellow-painted, 70's paneling. The flooring was stained, old, industrial carpeting. To make matters worse, the padding under the carpeting was hit-and-miss. The worst part was the sub-floor: Particle boards of varying thickness (so an uneven floor) that was nailed directly on top of the old floorboards. It was a LOUD floor. If you walked upstairs, we heard you downstairs. Especially when laundry was being done. Oy.

Here's the after! New flooring and we sprung for rubber, noise-reducing pads under the new floors. It's quiet. The walls have been patched of holes. The trim has been removed. We kept the paneling (for now; we may get rid of it in a few years), so I patched all the lines on the panels so the panels looked flat. Then I added texture to the walls using Behr's paint texture. Finally, the walls were painted in a light cream color. Two small walls on the other side of the room (in the laundry area) are painted blue. Any trim in the room is white.


The laundry area was a similar situation noise-wise. But, instead of just particle board, we had: Linoleum, glued to plywood, nailed to particle board, nailed to the subfloor. NO PADDING. It was loud, even with the quiet, modern machines.

And now? Oh-so quiet.

More photos to come as we finish up the upstairs, but I thought I would at least post, finally, the major improvements!