Sunday, November 21, 2010

Home Addition: Floors

This project has been oh so very long and arduous. Drew keeps saying to me, "we're gettin' there," whenever I stress about one of the many items left to finish without the help of our general contractor.  I am now starting to believe him.  When sitting down to write this post and looking ahead to the next few posts, I realize that we are putting many of the finishing touches on our little big idea we had back in January.  Finally, some "done" pictures to share!

Here is the bathroom floor.  It still needs a good buffing, but the grout is all in.  The shower is actual split pebbles and the main floor is travertine.  It looks warm and earthy. It will be fun to take a shower standing on pebbles.

Here is the 5" wideplank hand-scraped engineered pre-finished hickory in the bedroom.  I love the look and feel of it.  I am not a big fan of the hand-scrapped look that is so popular right now, but this floor's handscrape-y-ness is very subtle and it is not shiny. 



Here is the rustic 3.25-inch red oak solid pre-finished hardwood  in the kitchen and new office/family room area.


We had planned to go with slate tile in the kitchen, because slate is a great natural product and tile in the kitchen is a good choice. But early on in the remodel, we changed our minds and went with oak.  Oak is common in these craftsman bungalows and we like ours in the dining and living room.  We thought using a similar flooring in the new part of the house would tie the old and new in better than slate tile.

Friday the hardwood guy came back to sand and apply a second coat of polyurethane to the stair treads, hallway, and patch between the new flooring and old house.

The blue and green tape will come off after he comes back for the last coat, since we weren't happy with the job they did.

Here is the new 2.5 inch oak in the hallway. This is solid oak and matches the old flooring almost exactly.  Finally, 5 years after ripping out the teal-colored carpet in a fit of home-improvement gusto, we have flooring back in the hallway.



Here is the transition from old existing dining room floor (yellow colored floor in the foreground), to new very similar patch (slightly lighter band), to new pre-finished floor in the kitchen (reddish floor farthest away).  The new flooring is only about a quarter of an inch thicker than the old floor so there is just a small lip and it looks as good as I could have hoped for.





So as I sit here by the new gas fireplace keeping me oh so toasty in my dusty rocking chair, getting a little headache from the last coat of polyurethane on the stair treads, I can finally see the end in sight.

11 comments:

  1. Floors are looking mighty fine! What happened to the General? Contractor that is?

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  2. Looks great! We have a pebble shower in our newish master bath - soooo nice, you'll love it.

    -Eliza

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  3. Lookin great Lucy!!! Larry and I are working on our staircase upstairs. We have finishing touches left. We also do not have the advantage of complaining as we are our own contractors-it's a good thing but also bad thing when things don't go as you plan! Here's to all the fun of remodeling! ** :) Tia & Larry Jastrzebski, Fargo

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  4. Ruth, The GC deserted us after we paid the last big bill. He couldn't get any finish carpenters to work for him, so we just found our own. We have the direct line for all the rest of the subs, so we're just dealing with all of them ourselves. Not an ideal situation, but at least we are in control.
    Eliza, I can't wait!
    Tia, good to hear from you! Hope your staircase is done before Christmas so you can string garland around it.

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  5. Could you please let me know what brand/style the hickory floor in your bedroom is? This is exactly what I've been searching for. Thanks so much!
    stevewendyv at gmail

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    1. Wendy,the flooring is White River Hickory by Columbia Flooring. It was medium priced if I remember correctly. So far, it has been holding up very well, although we have it in our master bedroom, which doesn't get a lot of traffic. Thanks for reading.

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    3. Not sure if you are still seeing comments from this particular blog. But if so, could you tell me the manufacture of the 2.5 inch oak floors that you used in the kitchen? We have a similar type of wood in our house and we now want to put it in the bedrooms, but the company that we bought our wood floors from in no longer around.

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  6. Hi! Not sure if you are still getting replies from this blog posting, but thought I would try. Could you tell me the manufacturer of the 2.5 inch wood floor that you put in the kitchen? Thanks.

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    1. Hello Virginia, I'm not sure of the manufacturer, but I wouldn't recommend anyway. The new floor was pre finished and it wasn't a before the finish started wearing off. We ended up sanding the old and new floors down and refinishing. The new floor had to be sanded way deep to get rid of the little bevels on the edges. The floors are holding up only so so. we have lots of dings in the kitchen.

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    2. Oh wait, I wonder if you are talking about the flooring in the hallway, which matched the old floors in the dining room? Our floor guy used his connections to get this somewhere here in Utah. It is made specifically for matching to old floors I think. I don't know that we ever knew the manufacturer, as we just got it through the flooring guy and it came in an unmarked bundle.

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