Floored

Immediately after my husband, Jeff, carried me over the threshold (yes, we are super cheesy) into our new house in June 2008, the first thing I did was run into the living room to tear up a corner of the carpet to see what was underneath.

Our realtor swore up and down that there were definitely hardwoods under that baby blue carpet. There are oak floors throughout the bedrooms, but the basement has a drop ceiling, so we couldn't be sure. I wish I had gotten the realtor's sworn oath on paper so that he could have paid for the material when I lifted the carpet and there were no such hardwoods underneath.

I took it surprisingly well. Jeff was shocked as I am not usually so flexible. The reason I was so calm about it was that since we bought the house I had been picturing it with dark dark dark, wide plank wood floors. The oak floors in the bedrooms are only about 1 1/2" strips, and I wasn't sure how well they'd take a dark stain. Now I was able to make my dream a reality.
We were off to Lowe's with absolutely no knowledge of how to lay hardwood floors, but we ordered 400 square feet of Jacobean Bamboo floors and figured the rest out as we went.

Luckily a few of Jeff's co-workers had laid their own floors and one of them even owned the nail gun and compressor necessary for the job. Also luckily we had gotten a compound miter saw for a wedding present and another friend owned a table saw.

I laid the pieces out as Jeff nailed.


And that's how we went from those first pictures at the top of this post to this:




And I got my dream floors



















* That's Conrad on the back of the loveseat. I keep telling him to get a job and to quit being so lazy. He says "Time's is hard."