Homespun,  Young Victorian

Hardwood Flooring; Getting Acclimated!

How Hard Could It Be?

Thanks for visiting again! We’re going to talk hardwood flooring today. But first, it dawned on me after I wrote the last post that I hadn’t really talked about the overall renovation game plan. I eluded to it but just to clarify, this renovation is nearly all DIY! Yep, we’ve done most all of the work ourselves and even though it has been a challenge, seeing each project come together has been very exciting. We weren’t too terribly sure of where we would get all of the spare time to fit-in the many projects we had planned and run two businesses at the same time, but we were dedicated to making it happen, just the same. Three major factors contributed to this decision:

  1. The sheer number of projects and amount of work that needed to be done would mandate a lot of sweat equity; there was no other financially feasible option.
  2. Getting a fixer-upper and making it “ours” was something we had talked about for a long time. We’d gone the route of purchasing a new home before so “been there, done that” was pretty much our attitude.
  3. Warren is crazy good at so many things and we knew that we could handle a large renovation. But it takes more than just being good at a bunch of stuff, it also takes an even bigger chunk of common sense and luckily,  we’re both pretty good at bouncing “best approach” options off one another!

Hardwood Flooring 101

FaithSpun | Young Victorian | Colorado | Flooring
That’s a lotta, lotta wood!

So with that all said, let’s talk about today’s topic: HARDWOOD FLOORING! So last time we talked, we went over all of the major decisions that we needed to make on the flooring. And we ended up deciding to go with hardwoods in most of the house, tile in all of the bathrooms, and at least for now, painted sub floors in the kitchen areas. Next step, which we did like the day after we closed on the house, was to purchase the flooring. We wanted to get the stacks of flooring into the house and acclimated ASAP (in case anyone hasn’t dealt with a hardwood installation before, you need for the wood to basically get used to being in your house so it will stay flat once installed and not be negatively effected by the level of moisture or dryness within your home.) We calculated the amount of flooring that we thought we would need, rented a flatbed trailer and headed off to the store!

We initially needed 108 stacks of flooring! That meant 108 stacks of wood that had to be carried into the house and about half of that amount had to also be carried up to the second floor. Not gonna lie, that task was really hard but we worked as a team, just Warren and I. And back and forth we went and up and down we went, for what seemed like the entire day.

We placed in each room; the number of stacks we estimated each room would need. This all happened right after we got the keys to the house so we were still in the process of pulling up nasty carpetFaithSpun | Young Victorian | Colorado and at the same time going over all of the dog pee stains on the sub floors with Kilz to block any odors from the stains.

FaithSpun | Young Victorian | Colorado
We had to Kilz the dog pee stains and odor on the sub floors!

It was quite the process of cutting sections of the carpet, painting the stains, moving to the next room to repeat that process, move back to the previous room to move the wood stacks over to the dried floor, yada, yada, yada. A very systematic approach to ridding our house of the smell before the wood could absorb it!

Best Laid Plans – Literally

So yeah, the plan was to hurry up and get the wood acclimated so we could get the floors down fast! What ended up actually happening was that the floors did not get started for nearly 2 months!

Yours... Home | Young Victorian | Colorado | Flooring
Stacks upon stacks of wood in the house!

While the wood was acclimating, we moved down to the basement to de-mice the house (I had said in one of the first posts that the basement was the first project, but it did come after the flooring purchase), started the endless stripping of wallpaper in multiple rooms, began prepping the walls for paint after the wallpaper was down in some of the rooms, busted out the tile floor in the kitchen. And it goes on from there; we kept busy with multiple projects and we ended up with the most acclimated wood flooring ever!

We’ll come back to the floors soon; the process of installing them, sanding them, oiling them…wait til you see the end result! {Shelley}Yours... Home | Young Victorian | Colorado | Flooring

I am simply a wife, mom to four (2 humans and 2 dogs), and grandma to three sweet kiddos. I am a humble human working hard to build a stronger relationship with both my God and others; relationships that will prayerfully lead to more people coming to know the Good News of Jesus Christ. I'm learning to spin a little more faith into everything I do, every single day!

One Comment