Decisions, decisions.

After two days of hard pounding with a giant sledgehammer (by him), hauling and hefting and unloading at the dump (by us both), sweeping and shop vac-ing and baseboard removing and cement chipping (by the whole family), we have a clean slate.

Literally. Gray concrete floors, still finely dusted in the last remanents of saltillo powder. Creamy white walls with no pictures or decor.

During naptime, I hit up Home Depot for paint chips and samples of wood laminate flooring and booklets showing the stain and paint colors available for concrete. I have a stack the thickness of the yellow pages on the table next to me, and I'm sitting pretty on the promise of possibilities.

Normally, this sort of thing freezes me in place. I get overwhelmed. I can't make a decision. I want it all: stark white walls and a gray floor with pops of color in the decorations. Warm walls and a warm wooden floor, with silver picture frames and bright photos hung on the walls. Grays, blues, a granny smith apple wall. White cabinets. But right now, I'm seeing the possibilities and I'm loving them.

The first choice, and the biggest, most expensive and most time-consuming one, is to choose flooring. We've narrowed it down (so to speak) to three options.

First, the choice which is simplest to install but probably the most expensive and time-consuming to complete, is wood floors. While I'd love cork or bamboo, I'm on a laminate or Pergo budget.

The second option is probably the easiest and one of the least expensive, but also the least visually insteresting as we'd be keeping it very neutral and it would be monochromatic: painted concrete.

(Source, who ironically posted this photo in an entry about being over their concrete floors)

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The final option is to stain the floors, which is still relatively inexpensive, but from all I've read about the process it seems very time intensive. It does, however, seem to give the beautiful marbling and variety in hues I admire in a lot of pictures.

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Once we decide on the flooring option, we can choose paint colors that work well with it. I know we will be doing some bright white, inclusing refinishing the baseboards in that color. I'd also like to do our kitchen cabinets in white, but we may opt for something more colorful OR for leaving them alone, depending what we decide on for all the other walls and spaces.