Monday, February 27, 2012

Now We Can Use The Roomba!

Since I'm lazy and tired, I let Scott blog about our new floor:

For a over a year Anna and I have been looking at redoing the flooring on our main floor with hardwood. We picked out the flooring we wanted that went well with the new cabinets in the kitchen. It is laminate that is finished in a Brazilian Cherry.

I went to Home Depot and was browsing for a thing for my keys when I saw that the flooring we wanted was on clearance. I called Anna and told her, and she told me to get it. When I was paying for it, I told the flooring lady that I was going to pay with my Home Depot card and she said "Thanks for telling me that 'Lowes has that for cheaper' "(wink wink) and gave me an additional  5% off. Home Depot has a customer for life.

They loaded a full pallet plus 4 boxes into my truck and away I went. When I got home I looked at how much my truck was sagging from the weight and apologized to my back ahead of time. I started to unload the flooring into the house so it could acclimatize to the house. Then I started to rip out the old carpet, padding and tile. I started to rip up the tile in front of the door ... and, big surprise, I was able to pull out all the tile by hand ... no tools needed. I then started to rip out the carpet. Once I got to the sub floor I started to clean it up and prep for the new flooring when I saw that they had used finish nails (smooth shafted, very small head) to attach the subfloor to the floor joists.... that is why it squeaked all the time. I changed them all to screws. Almost all the squeaks went away.

I had Jorg come over and help with the install of the flooring. We put down a few rows and then stopped for the night.

Then next day we really went to work, getting about 2/3 of it finished.


The last day we finished and cleaned up. Here are some before and after pictures.




Buster is still getting used to walking on the floor ... he has face planted a few times.

Note from me: See the spots in the very last picture? I glued felt to the bottom of the furniture to prevent scratches. Superglue dries right away, right? Wrong. I still haven't figured out how to get those spots off. I have a new floor for a few hours and I've already ruined it.

We still need to do both sets of stairs and the upstairs landing, but that can wait.

1 comment:

kim said...

I don't know which I like better--the beautiful new floor or the fact that Buster is in two of these pictures.

Who am I kidding? Buster.

But it is gorgeous. You guys are amazing with your renovations.

Brooklyn still has problems on different floors at times--especially if she comes in with snow on her paws. She's wiped out more than once. But she's also the clumsiest dog I know.