Command Center Desk Creation!

So I wanted to show a before and after picture of the desks from the command center.
This is what they looked like before:

I removed all of the old molding and refinished the fronts of it with new molding. I sanded, painted, and then added a couple coats of polyurethane.  This is my first furniture project and I thought the results were fair.

Desks afterwards:

Dining room transforms into Command Center

This is the closest thing to a "before" picture that I have of this room. Obviously, at this point we had painted, changed the light fixture, and removed the hideous carpet. Just picture some ten year old carpet covered in cat pee and an old 80's style wrap around desk floating in the middle.
This room connects to the kitchen (to the left) I am standing in the living room, and to the right their is a stairway down to the basement. You can actually see off to the right where the floor was saturated with cat pee and had started to warp.

So step one for this room (after painting) was replacing the carpet with a strand of bamboo that Kevin and I had picked out. We had already tiled the kitchen at this point so we knew that we had to make the bamboo even with the tile floor. We ended up needing to put down an extra layer of OSB board in order to make the floor even throughout the whole house. So the first thing that needed to be done in this room was to replace the sub-floor that had the "water" damage.

This was the removal, we just completely took out one 4x8 piece. We used an assortment of tools including a circular saw and a pry bar (It was a pain in the butt to do this). If you do need to replace sub-floor it is important to make sure the board you buy to replace the original is the same width. The next step was to put the replacement board down, which we did...

 until we heard some meowing from underneath the board. We had to take the board back up and rescue one of our cats that thought it was the coolest place to hide. Then the board went back down and I took a picture of Kevin vacuuming because it doesn't happen very often.

After this step we had to put an additional layer of OSB board down throughout the whole room, I don't have a picture of that in this room. Once that layer was down the underlayment went down. We put a moisture barrier down first and taped it together then the foam went down that provides less squeaking of the bamboo plus some added softness when walking (or if cats are running across it).  

Books is helping us out once again with the flooring in this room, testing out the underlayment

We started the bamboo in our living room which connects to the "Command Center." We ran the bamboo perpendicular to the support beams, which will reinforce it. Connecting the two rooms was a bit tricky, it was important to stay square...even if your walls are not square! It's also important to have a gap between the wall and the wood to allow for expansion... the manufacturer of your flooring will give an estimated distance they want you to use to allow for the expansion... one of the things to remember though is that you will need to put quarter-round around the edges to cover the distance. (We didn't remove our base molding).  We bought a floor nailer from Harbor Freight and used it for the whole install, to use the model we bought you have to have a compressor, which we also purchased from H.F., we haven't had a complaint yet, I use the compressor at least once a week working on woodworking projects out in the garage. My advice is READ ALL THE DIRECTIONS! It's important to do what the manual says or it will stop working correctly. 

We were happy to note that the transition from kitchen tile to bamboo was nearly perfect. 

In this picture you can barely see the door frames, we used a friends advice and borrowed a biscuit cutter to get underneath the door frames so we could slide the bamboo seamlessly underneath and there would still be room for the wood to expand. I used a clear silicon to seal from the door frame to the bamboo afterwards. 

This picture is when we were almost finished with the "Command Center":

It's a little dark, but you can see the boxes of bamboo, plus the nailer, plus the hose to the compressor. Kevin and I worked as a very good team, I would make all the cuts and he would line up the nailer. It went fairly quick, but slower then we anticipated (as most projects do!)

I finally had a girlfriend come over and take some finish pictures last week!
Here is the nearly (I'll always work on decor!) finished product:

and...
So there we go, room 1! Almost/pretty much/mostly complete :)

Here are a few additional pictures: