Hardwood floors, they can't be that hard to install?

That is what I thought for the last 3 years since we moved into our house in PA. One of the things we loved about our new house vs our house in NJ was the open feeling that it had. We love that we can be cooking in our kitchen and still hang out with people in our family room. One of the things we didn't like was that there was this 1/2 wall between that kitchen and family room space so one day almost exactly 1 year ago I was saying to my wonderful hubby "wouldn't it be great it that dumb 1/2 wall wasn't there and we had one floor running through the entire first floor to totally integrate this space into 1 large great room type feeling?".
Well lo and behold after going out one day I come home to find the 1/2 wall gone which leaves a hole in the drywall and part of the flooring missing, so our journey to remodel/update our kitchen/family room space was to begin almost a year later...

I was lucky to meet a friend who is an interior decorator who further inspired us to get our project in gear. She had helped us with some decorating on our living room and had come up with some ideas and a mood board for our family room. Aside from redoing our floors we had also talked about expanding our island to fit our growing family. Our kitchen island is the one area that probably gets more use than any other. We eat breakfast there, check email there, chat with friends there and of course cook there. So with the addition of one more to our family to make it a nice even 4 we wanted to expand that to seat 2 more people and connect the space a bit more. Redoing the island was also something that my friend Lisa (the decorator) suggested as well.

So in addition to new floors Rick came up with a design for a new island that will hopefully be built and installed not too long after the floors gets done. Then our next task will be redecorating the family room to give it a more contemporary yet family friendly and warm feel.

We wanted to start a blog so that we could document all of the changes since this is the biggest home improvement project we ever done ourselves (really its my hubby doing most of the work, I'll do most of the documenting since I'm almost 8 months preggo).
This is an overhead view of our kitchen and family room, to the left is our eating area that is kind of like a sunroom with windows on all 3 sides. We love eating here and looking out on our yard.

This is the delivery of all the wood, all 37 boxes. Rick had the fun job of bringing it all into the house, where it now sits in 4 different rooms of the house waiting to acclimate.