The Hardwood Floors One Year Later

Last November, we finished our biggest house project – new hardwood floors and freshly painted walls.

You can read all about each step:

the process for picking our floors,

picking the perfect white paint,

what the messy progress looked like

and the big reveal.

One year later and both Ryan and I still agree that putting in new hardwood floors and having all the walls painted white was well worth the money, time and mess.

Over the year, I have received a bunch of questions about our hardwood floors. Today, I’m here to answer.

WHAT TYPE OF FLOORS DID YOU CHOOSE?

We for months before finally selecting pre-finished, nail-down oak hardwood.

We talked about carrying the existing blonde hardwoods into the hallway and living room (see a before here). We talked about doing tile. We talked about just keeping the hardwoods and replacing the carpet. We considered installing cheap wood and painting it all white. We even dreamed for a second about doing concrete (and then quickly woke from that dream).

At the end of all that talking, we decided to go with the best quality floor in our price range in a dark gray/brown. It’s maybe not our perfect dream floor – I think we would both go with wide-plank, medium tone if cost was no object – but it was a great choice for this house.

The actual flooring that we chose is discontinued, but this one is by the same manufacturer, just a different color.

HOW HAVE THE FLOORS HELD UP AFTER A YEAR?

We’re a big, chaotic family. We live in the Pacific Northwest where it rains a lot. We have a dog. The neighbor kids are in and out. Our home is where we live.

So, yes, after a year of living on them, the floors show some wear.

(See that big scratch in the photo above? That happened on day one when we moved the piano back in. UGH!).

We typically take our shoes off in the house, so that helps keep the floors nice, but Atlas, our labradoodle, has done his fair share of scratching the wood. We just recently added the sisal runner in the hallway to help prevent his nails from scratching when he runs obnoxiously to the door every time someone comes over. I’ve considered putting socks on him, but then remembered that he ate socks like it was his job as a puppy and thought better of it.

One little trick we learned from the floor installers is to keep a Minwax stain marker on hand to disguise any deep scratches.

You just fill in the wood, buff it with a paper towel and the scratch disappears.

ARE THE DARK WOOD FLOORS DIFFICULT TO KEEP CLEAN?

We were warned many times when choosing a dark floor that it can be hard to keep clean. Our friends have super dark, glossy floors that are gorgeous, but show dust and footprints and require a bit more attention than what I have to offer my floors.

Part of the reason we went with the matte finish, hand-scraped, gray/brown floors was in an effort to hide dirt, not make it more obvious.  Thankfully, this is exactly what we have in these hardwoods. They get dirty, for sure, but hide it pretty well and clean up nicely.

Ryan bought this industrial dust mop that I run across the floors daily to pick up dust, fur, crumbs and wool from our rug that sheds a lot. We mop with white vinegar + water once every two weeks (and by we what I really mean is Maria, our angel of a housecleaner).  Other than spot cleaning when there is a spill, I don’t do much else to them. I’d say the floors are quite low-maintenance.

Adding in hardwood was a big decision and investment for us and we’re so happy with the results. Having one consistent floor throughout the main level works wonders in keeping things visually cohesive and grounding the space. The color works well with our neutral color palette and we’ve been happy with how they’ve held up (despite our hard-handling of them).

And it’s crazy that a year has gone by so quickly.