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    Emily Fazio

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Hardwood Season

August 6, 2013

Carpet’s gotta go, yo. For one thing, we didn’t install it and even though it’s in good shape and had been nicely maintained, someone else lived on it, and therefore it skeeves me out. Also, it’s beige overload, from one end of the house to the other, the end. Did I ever mention that when I Dyson’ed it for the first time on the first day we moved in, I didn’t even so much as fill 1/5 of the vacuum canister? It was unheard-of clean, but still, carpet grosses me out. 

Tearing it out and prepping the floors will be no small task. We had wrongfully assumed when we bought the place that oak hardwoods ran throughout (after strategically lifting carpet in various corners which entirely seemed to validate our assumption). Our plan until the day of closing had been to tear out all of the carpets before we moved in, even to refinish the floors if necessary, but there, on the afternoon that I filmed my favorite home tour video ever, we uncovered several spots in the house where the carpeting was covering plywood. Cue the wide-eyed look of horror. We also found a nugget of hunter green shag, which we can only assume is what originally or previously carpeted the living room, dining room, and bedroom hallway.

Pretty green shag, an earlier iteration of the flooring in our home.

At this point, we believe that the bedrooms are fully oak, and the hallway, dining, and living room are subfloor. The closets off the living room and hallways, however, are hardwood, which makes us very curious. The whole thing seems completely backwards to me, yet I seem to be the only one really scratching my head over why they’d keep the bedrooms hardwood and leave the dining room carpeted. We’ll be interested to see where the fine line is with this whole subfloor-meets-oak saga, because it’ll make or break the amount of work that we need to do around here to get it rockin’ pretty, consistent hardwoods.

See, oak floors would be nice to extend through, but when we started to price things out–the cost of new materials, the labor involved with laying original oak (our labor, I should clarify), the refinishing to get the old and new rooms to match–we also started looking into the cost to replace everything all at once, and start with fresh, brand new floors. It’s fun, but it’d be more fun if it wasn’t a square footage (and subsequent dollar amount) that makes us sweat money out of our armpits.

It hasn’t stopped us from starting to save though, and certainly hasn’t stopped us from starting to shop for flooring. Shopping for new flooring, I can also point out, makes me sweat out of my armpits nervously (lots of armpit visuals today). I’ve always lived in homes and apartments with well-weathered hardwoods, the kind that are refinished smooth and poly-ed thick and, well, not so new that they appear to have some manufacturer’s sealant and absolutely no dings and dents. I like wearing shoes in the house and not having to worry about the condition of the floors. I like a little natural wear and tear. New flooring as an overall option makes me really… uneasy. But it’s proving to be one of the best options for us, from a cost, home consistency, and longevity perspective.

Hardwood floor shopping at Lumber Liquidators.

We’ve wavered back and forth on dark vs. light flooring. The old house had oak floors that were somewhere in between what we have been considering, but we’re equally inspired by both the dark-dark and the light-light options on the flooring spectrum. I still owe you some kind of master planogram to articulate the aestetic that we’re going for with this house. To be honest, it’s more necessary for us personally than from a blog content perspective, but we may as well show you too.

We shopped around a little. And I should say that we haven’t actually bought anything or signed our names on any big orders, but Lumber Liquidators ended up having great products at fantastic prices, with great warranties to boot. It was basically impossible for us to beat the selection locally, especially being able to see and touch samples.

During our first ever visit to our local store, we weighed the pros/cons of engineered vs. solid hardwoods–I wanted solid, Pete wanted something that will last only as long as he stands to live–and we took our time looking at lots of samples.

Hardwood flooring displays!

A few things worth noting:

  • The zebra striped brazilian woods will always look awesome. Too bad they seem so exotic/impractical. It is also the only flooring that a 6-year old will agree to have in his/her bedroom, so leave the 6-year old at home.
  • Make careful note of the natural vs. select flooring options. Natural is more inclined to have varying colors and striations between boards, whereas select is allegedly more consistent. The flooring samples in-store only cover a few square feet, and that you can’t necessarily see a difference on such small a scale. This goes for most flooring stores, not just LL. One of the associates pointed this out to us, and we’re glad they did.
  • Until I saw samples on the wall, I was sure that I wanted narrow hardwood boards like the ones in our old house. When I saw them in person, I realized that a wider board would probably be a more proportional fit to the large size of our rooms. The installer on-site even commented that 5″ boards wouldn’t look 5″ wide if they were in a big space, the illusion would make them look narrower. Plus, wide boards = faster installation and fewer nails. Bingo.
  • Bamboo’s kind of bad ass, especially when you’re considering the inevitable pounding of kid feet and dog claws for the next 50 years. But visible knuckles? They’re not my jam, and you can tell me all you want that they aren’t that obvious once installed, but I won’t believe you. Probably not, at least, not unless you show me that you’ve installed a super dark brown bamboo sample (Qing Spyder Strand) like this one that we took for fodder. It is so extremely dark that there are no signs of knuckles, but at an angle, are some unusual looking grains that we worry would be odd on a large scale. It’s cheaper than the other samples we saw though, and engineered and not solid. I know Bamboo floors aren’t a new thing, but I haven’t personally seen any homes that feature 50+ years old bamboo floors, so I don’t know how to gauge how well they really wear after refinishing and decades of abuse.

Dark brown bamboo flooring option.

Light wood would be great for our space, at least we think it would be. We’re both drawn to the look of light walls and light floors, especially in a house that needs a little oomph-oomph in the lightening and brightening arena. Light floors would seem to reflect a lot of light, where our current beige carpet only seems to absorb it.

And so here’s where we stand: it will probably be a maple, a birch, or an ash. We’re spending plenty of time looking at real-life samples of these light floors installed to see how it looks in mass.

Our hardwood flooring options, the light wood floors.

The intended installation is holding us up a bit in some areas of our lives (i.e. we don’t have shelving anywhere yet, and all of our books are in the basement) and from a timing standpoint, it would be great to get started on this in the fall so that we can have it done and be a little bit settled in before the baby arrives. Is it really possible? I’m not sure. Again, the money, the armpits, this is not a small decision.

No pressure. Onward.

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Flooring

Emily
I'm a home improvement enthusiast, living a very merry DIY lifestyle. You can find me writing for HGTV and DIY Network, follow me on facebook and instagram, or drop me a note if you'd like. I love notes.

7 Comments


Sara Aaserud
August 6, 2013 at 12:22 pm
Reply

We have oak flooring throughout our house. When we moved in, it was everywhere but the kitchen, and the stuff in the bedrooms was covered with carpet. Last month we had a floor guy install unfinished red oak in the kitchen and then he refinished everything in the house to match. (Even though the flooring in the bedrooms had been covered by carpet when we moved in, but the finish on them was super rough from stains through the carpeting over time.) You literally cannot tell where the old floor ends and the new stuff begins. We had the oak floors stained because I couldn’t stand the typical 50’s red/orange finish. Our guy did a great job.

Side note: we got a package of flooring from Lumber Liquidators for a countertop (still not installed 3 months later…but oh well!), and just know that the boards are short. Like, the longest boards were maybe 3ft long, if that? They were pretty small. Going with wide boards may not have the effect that you want if they are all kind of short.

I’ve heard that prefinished boards stand up better over time because the finish is baked/cured on. Our house was also pretty smelly when we had them refinished (and we were away for 2 weeks on vacation too). So I suppose there are trade-offs to everything!

http://beautifullycontained.blogspot.com/2013/07/hardwood-floors-details.html



    Emily
    August 7, 2013 at 8:52 pm

    THIS is so good to know. I have to do more investigative research at LL, it would seem. 3-feet long seems pretty short, I think we were imagining at least 6-8 ft. boards. Do you recall the brand that you bought there?

    The sales people said the same thing about the manufacturer’s finish. Refinishing was hard work when I did it in my last house, and I remember how bad smelling it was during the poly phase. I’ve breathed enough VOCs for a lifetime.

Callie
August 6, 2013 at 6:49 pm
Reply

During our last bathroom renovation, I TOTALLY fake-worked-out at the gym so I could use the shower!! Of course sometimes we would work out but sometimes who has time during a remodel!? Husband would just go use the gym shower without any self consciousness, but I felt too weird showering without fake-working-out first, even if it was just one lap running around the track. Ha! Sounds so familiar. :)



    Callie
    August 6, 2013 at 6:51 pm

    Oops. I totally meant to comment this on the post before, where it was actually halfway relevant. Sorry!!

    Emily
    August 7, 2013 at 8:50 pm

    That’s funny – I’m just imagining myself hauling myself and Julia into the locker room with our towels and shower basket and walking out the main entrance again 20 minutes later… I wonder how many times I’ll do it before the people at the front desk catch on.

Sarah
August 6, 2013 at 9:15 pm
Reply

It’s amazing what a light floor will do for brightening up a space! I work for a developer and we have a myriad of wood flooring types in our different properties. We have light colored bamboo floors installed in one of our buildings. In most areas they still look great, but in high traffic areas they have become worn, scuffed, and gouged already. (We installed them 5 years ago). In another building we installed unfinished pine which we stained and sealed to match existing floor boards. It’s only been 2 years and that flooring is a complete let down. It is coming up in huge chunks. In yet another building we have a matte finish maple flooring that we installed 3 years ago and… so far so good!

Granted, your home will receive a lot less traffic than our buildings but I thought I’d share some of the lessons we have learned the hard way. Good luck with your floors!



    Emily
    August 7, 2013 at 8:47 pm

    I loved reading this insight so much! We looked at some pine options but knew that it would wear similarly to the pine boards on our old deck (lots of dog claw marks) so we immediately ruled it out, but weren’t sure how well Maple would hold up. I’m surprised to hear of your experience with bamboo – that’s something you rarely hear – and sure, while a home may not get the same wear and tear in the same timeframe, I imagine that’s how it might look everywhere after a decade or two! Thanks for sharing, Sarah!

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