After a lot of consideration and thought I decided to go with the dark hardwood floors. I appreciated all your tips and suggestions you sent me and in the end you REALLY did help with the final decision. And since I've been living with these new floors for 3 months now I can give my own review:) YES, hardwood does scratch easily with dog claws! On the bright side and like one blog friend mentioned, they look worn and "lived on" and since I love the shabby chic look, I kinda like how much they've "aged" already! Yes, they DO show a lot more dust! On the bright side I got one of those handy ROOMBA robot vacuums and that little guy has alleviated the need to sweep daily...now only once a week! All in all I love them...the colour of the Espresso stain and the warmth and softness of the hardwood under my feet! And as an added bonus Nathaniel saw them for the first time on June 1st and LOVES them too!
Thank you to my good friend Michelle for helping me pull up all the old carpet and laminate throughout!!! That was hard work!! Thank you to Holly for the great tip on where to purchase the floors for a serious STEAL of a deal!
A secret message I painted under the floor planks for my hero ;)
We could have ordered an already-stained stair nosing but a cheaper and readily available alternative was to stain them myself...which I did (with Michelle's help!)!
I also decided on white painted risers...a little extra effort but totally worth it for the final look!
Here are the changes in short order: took the carpet off the stairs and replaced with wood tops and white painted risers (life changing with 4 pets to not have carpet on the stairs! LOVE), got rid of all the 3.25 inch baseboard throughout the house and replaced with 5 inch base (also LOVE), replaced the entire main floor laminate with the hardwood as well as the hallway upstairs (so basically everywhere our animals venture is now hardwood)!
I REALLY love the contrast between the dark floors and all the white in our house...I also took into consideration that in two years time we will hopefully be selling our house and moving home to Victoria and so if the dark floors become too much work then we aren't committed to them for too long. As an added bonus instead of having the insurance company use their contractors to do all the work, I took the payout instead. This meant that I had to organize all the repairs myself(thanks to my friend Tony who laid the floors) and do a lot of the work myself, BUT I wound up with enough money left over for me and Nathaniel to take a vacation somewhere!!
10 comments:
It looks perfect. Well done!
I'm so happy you are posting again! I love your new hardwoods and I love the painted risers on the stairs! it all turned out really beautiful...
Love the hardwood! well done and nice choice :) We are looking at new flooring currently and I know how tough it is to choose! How long did it all take???
It looks FANTASTIC!!! I love it all, you did such a great job! :)
Your floors look great! So glad your hubby made it home safe and sound.
Wow, everything looks great! Where did you purchase the wood floors?
jealous is an understatement! i've been adding more and more white in the house and if i had it to do over, i probably would've gone ahead with hardwood floors in our house instead of new carpet. it's not our "forever" home though so at least i have that to look forward to. :) now that you're back to blogging, i guess i better get back in the swing of things too or i'll now be the worlds worst blogger. ;) teehehehehe.
thanks for your lovely comments. we weren't in Vegas at the same time. :( but man oh man, if we were, meeting up would have been a MUST! :)
we've missed you lovely. glad you're back in action. :)
YAY!! SO happy you guys like it! It was soooo worth the flood lol! They seriously are my dream floors!
Becky~ it really didn't take that long ...we had about 1000 sqft or so (plus the stairs) of hardwood laid down...my friend Tony pretty much did it all himself and he took about 10 days total to do it including baseboard which he had a friend come and help him do (although he was here from about 9am till 5pm some days). The wood was all prefinished so it was just a matter of nailing it down and cutting (since he said we had a lot of weird angles in our house..and he also said if he had a second nailer we could have had the job done soooo much faster). So from start to finish we had new floors and baseboard in 2 weeks time :)
Audra~ the floors were purchased from Timbertown here in Edmonton! They are 3.25 inch Espresso Stained Birch Hardwood (prefinished)...and it was priced at $2.99 sq/ft. They had even cheaper hardwoods there in so many shades and finishes! I am SO greatful to Holly for sharing that tip with me cause otherwise I would have probably just ended up settling on what the insurance company could get me at that price.
Not sure where you are located but you can't beat the prices there!!
It all looks gorgeous. I have a question. I took the carpet off my stairs and painted but your stairs appear to be the same as mine under the carpet. What did you do about the existing nose on the builder steps when you added your wood and nosing? I would prefer wood steps with painted risers but can't figure out what to do about the nose already there. Love what you did. Thanks, Pam
hi Pam!! What Tony did was he shaved off that existing lip on the builders stair so that the noseing piece would fit properly...so then the builders step was at a flush 90 degree angle...after that we used mdf rectangles to go over the riser part of the stair for a smooth painting surface....I'm not sure what the tool is called that he used to shave off the lip on the builders stair but it looked like an electric turkey knife LOL!!! Hope that helps :)
Post a Comment