Changed Site URL – access denied

I have an ‘old’ wordpress site in the folder at http://www.theblonderunner.com/blog
and the site URL set to http://www.theblonderunner.com in the settings section. I had followed directions with the .htaccess and index.php file to see my site at the homepage. This works.

I made a ‘new’ wp site and put it in http://www.theblonderunner.com/wp and set the site to http://www.theblonderunner.com/wp While I have been working/changing/fixing it, etc. It works perfect.

Now I want this site to be live and not the other one. I changed the old site settings http://www.theblonderunner.com to /blog so it wouldn’t be the home page.

I then changed the ‘new’ site to WordPress Address (URL) http://theblonderunner.com/wp
Site Address (URL) http://theblonderunner.com/

I also copied the .htaccess and index.php files and put them in the root directory. First / root, didn’t work, then in the public_html.

Now it says access denied at the home page. I couldn’t log in. If I typed http://www.theblonderunner.com/wp/wp-login- that works, but then after I click log-in it takes me to http://www.theblonderunner.com/wp-login and doesn’t work.

I tried all kinds of settings with the .htaccess and index.php files

I went into functions and put the fix to get my site settings right so I could edit the site again. It all works at http://www.theblonderunner.com/wp again.

Now I’m just afraid to change things again because I don’t know where to start and in what order.

UPDATE:
So then I just changed the index.php file again to show
/** Loads the WordPress Environment and Template */
require( dirname( __FILE__ ) . ‘/wp/wp-blog-header.php’ );

Now my site works! BUT under settings/general I still have the site URL set to the http://www.theblonderunner.com/wp How is it working when you go to http://www.theblonderunner.com? I’m afraid to take off the wp. But that is how it should be, right?

Sorry for the long post, just trying to be descriptive.