Hours before departing for deployment, I finished some renovations on the kids' bedrooms upstairs. When we moved in, the two upstairs bedrooms were dingy, scuffed white, with thin, industrial-grade blue carpet on the floors. One of the best features of the upstairs, a dormer window, had been closed off from the bedroom proper, hidden behind a little plywood door in an attic crawlspace. So, where to start? Well, what we did was...

1. Paint. The girls chose pink for their room, and we painted the boy's room a shade of blue. Wherever did we come up with those choices? I know, I know, we're pretty creative. That was earlier this fall, so then we felt like we were on a little roll, and kept on going...

2. Add some built-ins. We hired a carpenter to build some bookshelves in the girls' room on either side of the windowseat. He also added some closet space in an unused corner of the upstairs landing. Both make for some great storage and shelf space...

3. Finish out the dormer. Next we had our carpenter frame out and finish the dormer, to incorporate it into the room. He made a good start, before ending up completely stuck as to how to make the angles work between the old and new walls. So we bid him farewell without hard feelings (before any irreparable damage was done) had another (more geometrically-inclined) carpenter come and finish the framing and put up the drywall. We finished the inadequate mudding job before priming and painting it. Before jack-knifing on the highway to dormer completeness, though, the two-dimensional carpenter did reveal to us an important find: an original long-leaf pine subfloor underneath the junk carpet! Ooooohhhh, Aaaaaah!

4. Refinish the floors. Oh, this nearly broke me. But now that I look at it, it's the thing I'm proudest of. This required first pulling up all the carpet (the deceptively easy part), followed by scraping all the tenacious carpet-glue off the wood, assisted with, at various times, a combination of heat-gun and chemical stripper. Next I sanded the floors (couldn't do this first - the glue gummed up even the most course sandpaper, and at $6.98 a pop I wasn't looking to go through a lot of the drum-sander rolls). Finally, the polyurethane finish went on and we had our new rooms ready! I then also found matching reclaimed longleaf pine at Alamo Hardwoods to finish the floor of the dormer.

So, you can look at the finished "before-and-after" pictures...

BEFORE

AFTER