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.