There will be very few occasions in our home-improving life that warrant an ALL-CAPS title and a celebration with sparklers and cake. Finishing the installation of our maple floors is one of those occasions. Happy new year to us!
We missed our self-imposed Christmas deadline by one day, successfully finishing the racking and installation of the maple floors in the last room–our master bedroom–on the 26th after returning from a short Christmas holiday with my family. There was immediate rejoicing in that we had 16 unopened boxes of flooring (it would seem that pregnant women make for bad square footage estimators) that could be returned, or sold privately to avoid Lumber Liquidators’s insane 20% restocking fee that magically appears if you can’t return your excess within 30 days of purchasing, regardless of the volume purchased and the scope of the project. 1,500+ square feet in 30 days, 9 months pregnant? Dude, no. By the way, if you’re local to Rochester and want to buy about 300 sq. ft. of unopened 5″ prefinished Bellawood natural maple off of us for a great price, let me know, we’re looking to move it move it, and we can vouch for how easy it is to install.
I’m anticipating the day that I can take all new photos of this house in its updated state, sans carpet, sans unopened boxes of Bellawood. In the meantime, we’ve already started reinstalling the trim throughout the house, a big project itself.
We salvaged all of the existing baseboard prior to installing the floors; Pete carefully labeled each and every piece so that we were able to replace the 50+ individual pieces in a matter of minutes. It’s been awhile since I wrote about this part of the project; we removed the trim originally because the installed floors sit slightly higher than the carpet did, meaning that the baseboards needed to be removed, repositioned, and reinstalled. Fortunately, having removed it carefully with intent to reuse saved us a lot of money, and saved us a lot of time cutting and coping new trim, though we will still need to purchase a bunch of quarter round to fully cover the 3/4″ allowance that we were required to leave for wood expansion.
All in all, we’ll be ringing in 2014 with a lot of mitering and caulking, but I’m excited to have this big project behind us so we can go about making this place looking fantastic. Also, looking forward to having a dining room table back; it has been disassembled since October.
To those of you who stuck with us through this long and drawn out project, thank you. I’ll get around to rewarding you with an extensive before and after tour as soon as the boxes are cleared and our Christmas tree is down. More fun not-related-to-flooring things to share in the next few days! Happy New Year, all.
7 Comments
Congrats! It looks great (not that I ever had any doubts).
It looks absolutely fabulous! It’s amazing how bright the rooms look now. Can’t wait to see more!
Definitely need to take new photos of all of the rooms… the floors make such a huge difference!
Just seeing this. Congratulations! The floors are so lovely. Happy New Year!
Thanks Kimberley! Happy New Year to you too!
Hi Emily, we are deciding on flooring grade for the 5″ Bellawood Maple we want to buy and I was wondering if you remember how much “selecting” out you did for the room in the first picture on this posting. We are still debating the select vs. natural. I read your post on this as well. The rooms we are doing are the living room, dining room and hallway. I also saw your post of your living room. I’m wondering if we should go with select since these rooms are the common areas. Thanks Emily! I hope your family is happy & healthy!
Hey Kari! Thanks for the note. The boards in that first photo actually seem quite varied in real life compared to other areas, like our living and dining rooms where we were intent on using more “blonde.” It looks nice in person, not too dark, not too light, and I racked the boards so that the darks and lights kind of flowed together as best as I could. We would be putting an area rug over this room (eventually) so I knew a lot of it would be hidden, but even unhidden right now, I like it. I thought each of the boxes had a fair amount of variation in the boards, but the only thing that surprised me that you should be aware of is that very few of the boards are >48″ in length. In hindsight, I can’t really tell now that there are so many short boards throughout each room (the <18" boards seemed REALLY short when I was going through them), but I always want people to know this so they aren't surprised when they open the order. Open boxes are not returnable!