New House Renovations: Picking out Flooring

If you’ve been following along you’ve seen our house get quite the transformation recently. But we’re not done yet! The next BIG step is new flooring. The wood floors that were in our house when we moved in were beautiful but they didn’t cover all the places we wanted them too (the living room, kitchen, guest bathroom) and they weren’t really our style. After looking into how much it would cost to match them we realized it would cost us a small fortune. So since we weren’t really in love with them, and didn’t think it was worth the small fortune, I started looking around for new flooring and ended up finding great deals at Lumber Liquidators.

I dove right into the endless supply of wood flooring options on their website, and after hours of going back and forth on which were my favorites, I chose my top 3 and asked them to send me samples. The sales team was super nice and more than helpful when answering my 100+ questions!

I honestly loved all of them but after hours of deliberation, testing each of their durability, asking our friends’ opinions, and walking on them to see how they felt on our feet, we finally made a decision.

I really loved the color of the birch samples but in the end we decided to go with the Moso Strand Handscraped Bamboo. Even though we loved the color of the birch samples we also loved the warmth in the color of the bamboo. We felt like the bamboo was a more timeless color that reminded us of an old building. The bamboo was also the most durable of the three samples. A friend of mine dropped a heavy metal spoon on each of them and the birch samples dented easily but the bamboo didn’t even get a scratch!

Once we placed our order my husband got to work on ripping out our old flooring. Of course he decided to take the week of Thanksgiving off, to rip the floors out, so this is what my house looked like 2 days before Thanksgiving.

 

It got even worse than this so the day before Thanksgiving we had to literally wipe down every single thing in the house because it was so dusty from all the floors getting ripped up. I’ll admit I was pretty stressed about the condition of our home, knowing I was hosting a Thanksgiving for 23 people, but in the end it was still fabulous and my guests were gracious about having to walk around on subflooring.

I personally can’t stand the subflooring because I feel like my house is always dirty now, so to remind me of why we have to live like this for a little while, I pulled out a couple boxes of the wood flooring and pieced it together. It’s beautiful so I just keep telling myself that one day (hopefully soon) all the floors will be covered in this beautiful dark hardwood!

 

But for now the rest of the house looks like this.

Lovely isn’t it?

 

My husband still has a little more flooring to pull up in the kitchen but after that’s up we can start on the install! We plan on doing the install ourselves so in the meantime my husband has been watching tons of “How To” tutorials on the Lumber Liquidators website. He’s learned a lot and is anxious to get started.

So next time I show you pictures of my floors they will be beautiful, no more of this nasty 20+ year old subflooring! But until then, if it seems like I’m going a bit crazy… now you know why. {wink}