the retro room: no longer retro

Welcome to the story of the longest room renovation known to man.

We've lived in our house for five years. It's safe to say that, while we don't consider ourselves "home renovators" or "project people", we've changed this house a lot to make it our own. It needed a lot of love. We (uh, Karl) have painted every single inch of wall space (save for one bathroom which will be painted before we move out!). We redid the kitchen (well, we picked out the flooring and cabinets and counters and paid for it anyway.). Before we even moved in, we tore out most of the carpet...discovering gorgeous hardwoods in great shape. (Down with carpet! Down with allergies!)

About three years ago, we tore the remaining carpet out of this room,
discovering this old school retro square awesome green and yellow square pattern that I love desperately. When we moved in, this room also had disgusting wood paneling. (Thank you 1970s! I do not like your wood paneling trend!) We painted over the wood paneling - and man did it look AWFUL. But we left it that way for, oh, a year or two (maybe three?), mostly because we were just at a loss of what to do in this room. Karl used it as his home office. I used it as the Room to Put Shit that has no other place. Various couches and desks have graced its floors. I tried desperately to make SOMETHING, ANYTHING work with the floors, but it just was not happening. We finally decided to make this Nate's playroom (future bedroom?). We filled in the crevices between the wood panels with a heavy texture paint and painted it (atmospheric is the color name; hoping for a robot theme!). We decided to have floors put down. They were laid this week. They look like this:
It may take us another three years, but the trim will eventually be painted white. I'm really happy with the finished product, but sad that my retro floors are no longer. Mostly, I will miss the way the very, very OLD glue beneath them crunched with each step across the room.

Slowly but surely, this house is turning more and more into our home.