hardwood floors – the delivery, the demo, the install

We have new floors in our house. We’ve been waiting and waiting and waiting for the right time and finally made it happen. Things have gone smoothly and fairly quickly and we’re now ready to clean out all the dust, move our furniture back in and get ready for hosting Thanksgiving.  I’ll take photos to show you the finished spaces (it looks so good!) once we have everything put back together, but for now let’s talk about the process of replacing our floors.

To recap, we had blonde maple in our entry (see it here), front bathroom and kitchen. The rest was a taupy/gray carpet (we still have it upstairs) in terrible condition from the past 8 years of kids and dog and entertaining and living. It was time for it to go. We ordered a million hardwood flooring samples, narrowed it down to our top picks and after a few days of staring at them, made our choice.

We ordered from Build Direct and the process was super easy. I measured, the customer service guys helped us figure out what trim pieces and overage we needed and it was official: our floors were on their way! Delivery day was pretty exciting … except when the handtruck couldn’t get the pallet up the driveway so Ryan and I had to carry each box one-by-one into the house. Let’s just say it was good exercise (ps. there were two of those pallets).

The second I had the chance, I tore that first box open to see our new floors.

We went with the gray-brown (here is the exact floor) and are very happy with the choice. Yes, we knew going into it that dark floors are a pain to maintain, but the matte finish and dirty brown color will hopefully do a good job of camouflaging dirt. Ask us in a few months if we’re still in love.

With the wood delivered, it was time to rip out the downstairs floors.

We started on Halloween with the living room carpet (fun day for all!) and then had a bunch of friends come help destroy our house that weekend.

It’s amazing how quickly you can mess up a house. Just FYI.

For the next week or so, we had painters here making our walls beautiful and white. It was nice to have it done before the floors went in so we didn’t have to worry about spills and drop cloths and the like.

And then, on a glorious monday morning, the floor guys came to work their magic.

It’s funny how you start to get to know the tradesmen … Derek and Alex and Thomas and James. They are good guys who work hard and even though it is a bit awkward to have four men in your house while your husband is at work, they were great.

We considered installing the wood ourselves to save money, but then came back to reality and realized that it would take us months and we would botch the job and maybe if we didn’t have a bunch of kids and work projects to finish up and family coming for thanksgiving in one week, we could try, but it probably wouldn’t work out in our favor. So we hired it out.

The guys were here all week – the noise, the dust, the saws and compressor – it was a lot. I was emotionally exhausted by the time they finished (that’s how you know you’re a true introvert) but it sure does change the look and functionality of our house.

While cleaning up after all was finished, Ryan looked at me said “why didn’t we do this 5 years ago?!” I think we made a good choice.

Full reveal photos to come soon (after we clean and mop and de-dust and re-hang pictures and move our furniture back in … )