Suburban Farmhouse Wood Flooring Reveal

Well we finally have a closing date. Only 5 weeks to go and we will be home owners once again. There has been a flurry of activity down at the house.

Long Awaited Reveal!!

It has been almost three months since The Hubster woke one Saturday morning and had the bright idea that Yes, we could redo our floors ourselves. I having have wanted to change out our floors before we even purchased our home said sure why not. Doing it ourselves was a brilliant idea.

Reno of the floors ended up involving the reno of our fireplace surround as well. We ripped out all the carpet in our living room and laid the new wood flooring down not once but three times!! First we floated it with underlayment. Decided after a few weeks we did not like the hallow sound of the flooring. Thought maybe it was because we did not level the floor before hand so up it all came and we leveled. Still hallow and so up it came up once again and decided to glue the flooring down. Soooo much better! We were thankful that we had purchased flooring that gave us three differ options of installation. I do not recommend gluing your flooring down unless it states that you can do so. Just thought I would throw that in there as a side note.

Well for the past few months I have been going on and on about our journey and how it was taking us FOREVER. Last weekend after tearing out the old glued down flooring ourselves we waved the flag of surrender. We were tired and I was wanting my house back so we called in the pros! 

Without much further ado here are the Before & After pics of our floor reno! 

Since the floors were finished today we have yet to move all the furniture back in. Makes for some more great Before & After posts!;) As you can see we decided to lay them horizontally. See those stairs believe it or not we are actually talking abt trying to tackle those ourselves! Yes, we are a glutton for punishment. I may make a video for the stairs and enter the True Value contest for $2500 I read abt on Miss Mustardseeds. 

Here is the office. The before pics are from when we first moved in and before I painted. This room looks sooo different!

View from office to foyer and then the before & after of the dining room. I was wanting to do some type of wainscotting in the dining room before we move everything back in but it is just not in the budget right now so I have decided to just be happy with my new floors and chandy! The Hubster hopefully will be installing the chandy for me tomorrow! I am really excited and can not wait! 

Though the floors are done I still have this to tackle! Something to do this upcoming week when I feel like being a night owl!;)

This was the BIGGEST reno that we had ever attempted by ourselves or with help and in the end we think it turned out pretty awesome. Total quote for project with materials was around $10,000. Total actual cost was a little less than $5,000 for supplies and all The Hubsters new toys/tools. That total even includes hiring out the tail end. Not too shabby!

Thanx for coming along on our journey! 

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Defeat

  Today I am watching paint dry, sorda. See last Saturday after renting our umpteenth tool to clean up the sub floor we decided to wave the flag of defeat! Yep we had had enough. We were thru. Actually beyond thru with it all. We fought a good fight and honestly could have finished but we were tired. I was tired. We are going on three months now having our home in disarray and there seemed to be no end in site. We called in the big guns.

They came this morning and thus me and the boys are sitting around waiting for the new leveling to dry.

It is already looking more fabulous! Now here is hoping that the cats who are upstairs do not figure out again how to open the door. I was not thrilled the last time when Max ran thru the thin set we did in the living room. I had to chase him thru the house and try to get it off his paws. No that was not a fun evening!

Speaking of stairs the flooring guys were nice enough to leave us a path to upstairs though the boys know NOT to even go near there. I can just picture one of them falling in it. EEK!

So yes, we feel defeated but at the same time we feel major relief! Trust me this was suppose to be a total DIY project and that was the only way it was gonna work but thankfully we got a hook up from a pal. He gave us the number of the guy he used and that person lays floors for a living for the builders. We just could not pass up his quote to not only level the floors for us but to actually finish the gluing of the floors for us! Tomorrow morning they will be back to start glueing and trust me when I say it will be well worth all the hot dogs and PB&J sand whiches we will be eating in the next few months!

Hope your week has been a grand one!

Yawn...Starting from scratch.

Yes, I know y'all are tired of hearing abt our flooring reno project! Trust me I know cause well I am too to be honest but this is my life right now so I am just gonna keep it real.  For those out there who have never tackled such a DIY project let me not scare you away from it but do let me warn you that you WILL spend more than ya think and it WILL take longer than ya think and there WILL be times when you are sitting on the cement foundation in your living room crying and wondering why on earth you ever chose to mess your house up. Trust me when I say this! 

With that being said we spent almost two weeks with our entire living room floored. It was sooooo pretty y'all and I could not wait to share it with ya but when it came down to it we were just  not happy with it. When we purchased it we made sure we could either float it or glue it down or nail it down since we were not quite sure which way we were going with it. Well we decided to float it.

This is what sits out in the garage. $300 of premium sound reduction/moisture barrier. Yep, that's right over the weekend we just decided to start from scratch. Start from square one which involved taking each row of flooring up one by one and keeping them in order and then carefully rolling up the barrier in hopes of trying to sell it at a deep discount on the local yard sale site. We made this decision heavy hearted because we knew there was no going back once we did this. 

This is life today. We took up the floating floor and decided to glue it down. I could not get use to the hallow sound it made and the cushy feel underneath. No matter what we did to remedy the situation nothing worked and thus taking up the floor and starting over was the only option. It takes me abt 15 min to glue down one row of flooring and well this is as far as we got on Sunday. Am I sad any longer about how our flooring is going. NOPE! Not one bit! When we walk out of our bedroom in the mornings we have a smile on or face because we LOVE how the glued down floor looks and feels!! No more hallow sounds, no more cushy feel, and no more being able to watch your floor move when ya walk across it. Three cheers even though we now know we will be working on this project well into June since we are doing the foyer, dining and office as well. In the end it will be worth it though.

We will be done with the living room in two weeks and then will probably hold off on ripping up the old flooring up front till after the school year ends. It is super busy right now and hard for me to stay caught up! I promise to share abt other things because well honestly there is nothing I can do during the week but stare at my cement floor so I know I will be finding some new projects to tackle.

On another note guess what happen on Sunday in the midst of gluing flooring down!!?? My frenchy side table found a new home!! I was sooo excited and it was actually kinda funny cause a gentleman came to look at it and his wife was in the car. When he was paying me I told him I hoped his wife would enjoy it thinking he came along just in case we were psycho or something. He said oh no it was not for her but for him!! He was buying it for his side table next to his chair in the their living room!:) I just thought that was soo funny and I was truly honored that a guy saw the beauty in my table.

Now what to do with the second one I have? Hmmm, I am thinking maybe a Harlequin design on top.

Vertical or Horizontal?

Source Unkown
So there is a great debate going on. Well maybe not that great but I mentioned to the Hubster how I would like to lay the new flooring horizontally instead of vertically. I figured it would be a nice change from the expected. I also figured since we are doing floating wood floors it would be easier to keep them lined up. We start laying at the front door and work our way to the back of the living room. Makes perfect sense to me.
The Hubster is not soo keen on the idea.

Source
Found this pic this evening of a floor laid horizontally so I know I am not crazy. I also stopped by Show &    Tell this evening and Sausha has her floors laid that way as well. Click to see her space! It is amazing!
So do you think I am crazy? What would you do? Do you think it would be easier to lay it horizontally??

A Change

The Hubster woke up this morning ( I write this morning but mean Saturday since it is already after midnight!) and got a wild hair! He wanted to see if our wood flooring was glued/nailed down. I had remembered that a piece of molding was popping off in the dining room.

 One thing led to another! So what do ya think!? 

Had ya going there for a moment didn't I!?;) Really The Hubster did wake up this morning and wondered that. He was wanting to pull some molding up and I was afraid he was gonna break it and we would never get a new piece to match the existing wood flooring we have in the foyer, dining, and office. It was a definite commitment to see what could possibly be in store for us. Thankfully that loose molding came right up and it appears some boards are glued down and some are not. So that got The Hubster to thinking really hard abt us starting on the biggest DIY project we have ever done together. Trust me there are not many and this will be HUGE! 

Later today we went looking for blinds  for the master...thankfully scored some....and came across this wood flooring. What a coincidence! It is engineered wood flooring which is what is down now in our home and was suppose to have been swapped out by the builder when we bought the house but never got done. We priced hiring it out and well just the tear out and install was $4500 not to include the flooring! That was not money we were wanting to spend at the time. We still do not want to drop that much but I think we REALLY want this flooring and the flooring and supplies will come out to be less than the quote!  So we think we can be DIYers just maybe.

We have tested the flooring for scratching and what not and it passed with flying colors. Tomorrow we are going to check out one other place just to make sure we do not see anything else. The only other thing that is holding The Hubster back is the fact he knows I want the stairs done and we are not sure how to accomplish that. So do we do the floor and ignore the stairs in hopes that we can match up one day or do we pass and live with carpet?? That I think will be the deciding factor. I say we can always match up later. 

Hope your weekend is going well!