When Dan and I bought this house in 2006, it was because we loved it immediately. We made an offer within an hour of seeing it for the first time and it only took us that long because I needed a few minutes to breathe deeply and remind myself that when you buy a house, it's perfectly normal to tell total strangers that you're willing to hand over large sums of money in exchange for a property you've just laid eyes on. Dan was ready to make an offer while we were still standing in the house, ten minutes after he walked through the door.

But amidst all the love we felt for the house before, during and after the sale, the one thing we really hated from the first moment was the kitchen floor. The kitchen/dining room in this house is spacious, well-lit and beautiful, but for reasons that I will never understand, the builders of the house decided to sabotage it. They did this by laying a really thin, cheap-looking linoleum in the kitchen area, and then, to add insult to injury, selecting a beige CARPET to put in the dining area. Where the table is located, along with the back door to the yard. So basically, they put carpet where everyone eats and wears their dirty shoes into the house. Brilliant!

Needless to say, this carpet looked as though it had been dragged behind a truck on a cross-country road trip. The linoleum had not fared much better, and was peeling in places. Cleaning the kitchen floors was an exercise in futility, since you could scrub, vacuum and mop all day long and they would never, ever look clean. So we knew that our first major house project would need to be replacing those floors. But we never got around to it. It was hard to choose what new flooring we wanted, hard to find a convenient time to shut down our kitchen, and really intimidating to think about taking on such a big job by ourselves. Prior to buying a home, our entire do-it-yourself experience consisted of picking up the phone and calling the apartment maintenance people whenever anything broke. We're not exactly what you'd call experienced.

This, among many other reasons, is why it is such a good thing that we have friends named Mike and Susan Newnam. Mike and Susan don't just have power tools. They have a two-story workshop on their property that they built themselves just to HOLD all their power tools and the things they are building with them. And even though they are very busy, they are also very generous with their time. So much so that when we really got ready to do this flooring project, Mike and Susan cheerfully came over and spent two days of their lives helping Dan do it. All this went on while I was out of the state, so I contributed absolutely nothing to the work, and only had to leave, have a nice trip, and then come back to gaze at my beautiful new wood laminate flooring. It's really completely unfair, but I'm so thankful.

So without further ado, I present to you some photos documenting the transformation of our kitchen floor, our biggest home renovation project to date.

First, the before. Here is the view from the kitchen looking into the dining room. Notice how you can actually SEE the big, nasty stains on the carpet, even from a great distance.

Here is our garage, filled with appliances that Dan and Mike moved, as well as various manly power tools that Mike brought over for the job. I am told there was a lot of sawdust. I am sure it made Dan very, very happy to have sawdust and loud racket billowing forth from his garage. That's what garages are for.

Here are Dan and Mike hard at work.

And now, the finished product: Brazilian cherry laminate floors that make the room look so much bigger, so much cleaner, that I want to lay down and kiss them just about every time I come into my kitchen.

The days on the calendar are flying away, and soon we will have to move on to the less power-tool intensive task of buying and setting up baby furniture. But for now, we are spending a couple of days marveling at how great it feels to have the one thing we really disliked about our house fixed, and how blessed we are to have friends who are willing to do so much work just to help us out. Thank you, Mike and Susan!