New Entryway

 This the entry to our front door.  There is white carpet, so thick that the door doesn't even open without some major use of muscles.  I can't put a carpet here, to prevent the entry getting dirty, because the door would never open.  With 23 piano students coming through this door every week (and they walk across the muddy lawn to get there, because there are no sidewalks!), this area is getting dirty beyond repair! 

To at least keep the entryway clean for now, while I talked Mr. Right into cutting out this section of carpet and replacing it with some laminate.  We actually found two boxes of brand new laminate at the Habitat for Humanity for $12 each.  The expensive part was the trim between the laminate and the carpet. It ended up close to $20 each and we needed three pieces, one for each side. If there was some way to do the transition trim cheaper, I would be all over that!

 Here's the carpet and pad cut out.  We found red fir underneath and were pretty excited about the nice condition of the wood.  Someday, we plan to take out all the carpets and see what we have!  Hopefully we can go back to the original woods, but for now, we have too many projects!

Here's the finished product.  We didn't do any cutting of the laminate.  We used the full length of the pieces of laminate coming away from the door to make the size.  Also, side to size, we went as wide as full pieces, so we didn't have to cut them and make the transition difficult to create.  We talked about running it all the way to the wall to the left, so we could have an little entryway coat hanging place, but we are putting that in the addition where we'll enter in the future.

It makes me so happy that my students can come in the front door, take their shoes off, and not destroy my carpets!  I love, too that we have a clear spot for entering the house! What do you think?  Not the cheapest project, but it does save us in replacement of the entire carpet in the living room, because there was no way we would get it clean.