Flooring Dilemma: Take It or Leave It?

Flooring Decisions

During the three plus months of waiting to close on the house, we developed so many iterations of our renovation plan. And the flooring was probably the aspect that changed the most. Here’s what the entire thought process looked like, as best as we can recall:

And I should divulge now that given an unlimited budget, our first choice would have been to do all new hardwoods throughout the entire house but we were really trying to conserve funds and live with certain things until a later date. The first plan was to replace all of the carpeting because it smelled so bad and we literally starting pulling it up in the first few days because it was so gross.

Oh and no such luck finding hardwoods under the carpet; that type of pleasant surprise is reserved for truly old homes!  We thought getting new carpet would be the quickest and cheapest fix for the currently carpeted rooms. We knew we would be doing tile in all of the bathrooms eventually, so no decision there. But we did still need to figure out what we were going to put into our offices (one was carpeted and one had sheet vinyl.)  We definitely did not want carpet or sheet vinyl in those rooms so that was the first dilemma.

We thought maybe we could match the existing hardwoods in the foyer to those rooms since they were both attached to the foyer (both upstairs and downstairs). And matching the finish on the wood wouldn’t be a problem since we would need to sand and refinish the existing foyer wood anyhow. There had been an estate sale held in the house before it was vacated and the floors had been badly damaged so one way or another, the existing hardwoods needed some significant work.

When we began searching for carpet and a match to the hardwood size and species, we had two issues to contend with. First, the cost of the carpeting and matching hardwoods for the offices ended up being a lot more than we expected. And that was tough to swallow because matching the existing wood and putting in carpet was only a temporary solution for us; maybe a few years until we could put all new hardwoods down throughout.

Our second issue was with the wood flooring. We knew we’d have at least one problem because we were in the dead of winter and there would be no way to properly ventilate the house while staining and poly-coating the wood. And there was no way we were going to move out of the house during that time. The flooring was something that needed to be done right away, so how would we deal with the fumes and the time it would take for all of the refinishing?

Not the Tile Too!

Meanwhile, after closer examination of the kitchen tile, which we had planned to  live with for awhile, we determined that there were too many broken and missing tiles in highly visible areas of the kitchen to keep the tile. (See how these things snowball?)

So now we were looking at all new flooring throughout the entire house. Great, now which way do we go? It’s at that point that we started to try and get our heads around installing hardwoods throughout; just bite the bullet and make it happen. If we had to sacrifice another project  for funding, so be it. Keep in mind that we were planning to do all of this work ourselves and there was still the issue of fumes in staining and finishing the wood floors during the winter. Buying pre-finished flooring was definitely way out of the budget so we needed to stick with natural flooring and finish it ourselves. I started researching finishing options and found an amazing product called Monocoat. It’s an all natural oil finish that goes down in one coat with no need for an additional polyurethane finish and it comes in multiple colors. Best part is that it is completely non-toxic and VOC-free (VOC = Volitile Organic Compounds = stuff you don’t want to breath in!) Monocoat also dries quickly so we were really excited and knew that we had found our perfect product and finish. We had our way around the stinky, toxic, and time consuming process of finishing the floors! Now what type of wood could we afford and what did we really want the end result to look like?

Making New Old

All along, a huge draw to this house was that it was newer but made to look old. So throughout this renovation, we tried to exploit that same concept as often as possible. How could we put brand new floors in that looked like they had been here for decades, even a 100 years? What we stumbled upon was a skinny 2 1/4″ utility grade red oak flooring. It was not only less expensive than say matching the foyer flooring but it was going to allow us to get the old and aged look that we really wanted because it was riddled with imperfections. Perfectly imperfect, yes! We knew from the beginning that we didn’t want anything pristine and shiny because we’ve got two dogs and three little grandkiddos and we never wanted to be freaked out about them trashing the floors. If the floors got dinged up and scratched from use, they would just have a little more “character” and give us that timeworn, lived-in for decades look that we wanted. So there, decision made on the hardwoods and in the end it would cost us a little less than had we gone with the first plan of carpeting and matching existing hardwoods!

While that decision helped with the majority of our flooring dilemmas, we still weren’t sure what to do with the kitchen. We weren’t really sure if we wanted them in wood at the time and it’s a big area (kitchen, nook, and pantry) that could tip the cost of the wood up too high. But the only other option was tile and what kind of tile would we put in there? Remember, we were wanting the floors to look old (not 90’s broken tile old, but vintage chic old!) Any contemporary tile was going to look “off” from the rest of the floors. We even considered quality old-school linoleum but alas that stuff is really expensive (not talking cheap sheet vinyl, there’s a difference)! So until we could make that final call, we thought we would just take everything down to the sub-floor in the kitchen area and paint the plywood with a fun stenciled pattern until we could decide on tile later. So there’s our plan! Or was it? Stay tuned, you do know there’s another iteration coming, right?

In the next post, we’ll talk about installing the hardwoods! Hope you’ll join us again for that discussion! {Shelley}