Let us talk about wood, shall we? As we mentioned on Tuesday, we chose to go with solid oak hardwoods for the four bedrooms and the hallway upstairs since many rooms downstairs along with the stairs themselves have a pleasant medium toned oak already (fairly similar to the hardwoods in our first house that ended up being especially dog/kid friendly). As for where to get it, first we looked on craigslist to see if anyone had a large quantity of something in the right tone/amount (no dice) and then we headed to Lumber Liquidators, since we have had luck with them when it came to buying hardwood floors for half of our first house back in 2007 and it is also where we got the cork flooring for our kitchen in 2011. They consistently have a ton of selection, and tend to have plenty in stock along with all of the underlayment & tools in one place, so they are fairly much a one stop shop for us now that it is our third time to the flooring rodeo.
Clara walked right in and made herself comfortable (the girl’s right at home on wood flooring, what can I say?) and we had a look around.
She also had some lively on the compact set of display stairs. According to the folks who work there every kid who enters the store does that as some sort of unspoken toddler rite of passage.
We ended up grabbing six distinct samples to hold up against the stairs to see which one would be the best match (we tackled this “sampling phase” right before ripping out all of that nasty upstairs carpeting). Since the sun was setting, we waited until the next morning to take them to the new house so we could judge them in natural light.
We chose to try stripping the carpet off of simply the top stair so we could be sure the wood under there was still in good shape (if it was fully damaged we’d have to refinish them, which would mean that we could be less careful about picking a matching wood tone for the upstairs). Thankfully the floor under the runner was in strong shape (after we pulled about a hundred staples out by hand) and we enjoyed the medium brown tone (not too yellow, not too dark, not too light). In short it is the Goldilocks of hard wood.
For a bit more on why we enjoy not-too-dark-not-too-light-not-too-yellow-not-too-red-toned oak, it is likely 50% personal preference (some people enjoy it redder or more golden) and 50% practical (if you go too dark with hardwoods we hear that every spec of dust and pet hair can be seen, and if you go too light we have heard that wear and tear is also easier to spot since it is such a light surface). And since we had practically the same tone of oak hardwoods in our first house for years (and it worked well for us – we enjoyed how it looked with our furniture, etc) that ended up swaying us. Can you tell from this bad iPhone picture of all the samples (sorry!) which one works the best with the stairs?
Yup, it is the bottom left guy. He was the only one in nearly exactly the same color and with the same variety of grain (some dark grain and some light grain). It was also the same thickness (2 1/4″) as the hardwood downstairs. So although we enjoyed some of the wider board options, it felt true to our house and pleasant and cohesive to go with the one that was the right color, had the right amount of wood grain, and was the same width as the rest of the wood flooring in the house. It took everything in us not to keep going down each step with the crowbar and the pliers, stripping that stained old carpet as we went. But we knew we had a date with the carpeting upstairs (it is more essential to rip that out and lay the new hardwoods before we move than it is to get it off the stairs, which can be done at any time). In the bad news department, that top step took us about 20 minutes to wrestle free (which means we have about three hours worth of work in our future). But stair runner, you have been warned. We will be back.
So after judging those samples in the pleasant natural light of the morning, we returned to Lumber Liquidators a day after our first trip to officially put in our order. We were armed with the square footage for all of the areas we needed to do, so now that we had picked our Hardwood Bachelor (he accepted our rose and everything), it was fairly straightforward. Here is a close up of our winner winner chicken dinner. It is called Lono Oak and it is a solid wood floor (it is not engineered, and it is 3/4″ thick so it can be refinished many times) and it comes with a 25 year warranty. Most hardwood flooring is in the $4-7-ish range, but LL’s list price was $3.69 per square foot.
Here is where I smiled sweetly and asked my go-to negotiating question, which is “what is your best price?” Then you simply stand there. Resist the urge to mumble “uh, not that I am trying to be tough” or “I am sorry, forget it” Simply stand there in silence and wait to see what they say. If they can come down, they’ll tell you. And if they cannot they’ll say they cannot and you can smile and say “simply had to ask.” John hates this step, so it is consistently my job. And before I threw out my go-to line, I also mentioned how this was our third big order from them so we are certainly loyal repeat customers. Boom: 10% off our whole order for those two sentences. So that took the price per square foot down to $3.29 and also scored us 10% off other things we grabbed like a special type of underlayment to work with our subfloor (more on that when we get to the installation process). Speaking of installing it, we are going to attempt to do it all ourselves, and we better get began soon if we hope to move in 2.5 weeks! Plus we want to paint all of the blue/mauve trim (and perhaps even the doors?) while the carpet’s out but before the floor goes down. So… yeah. Tick tock, The house team. Meanwhile Clara was busy spicing up their brochure displays…
We left feeling fairly excited about our big upstairs flooring overhaul. Especially since we asked how much it would cost to hire their folks to install all the flooring and they said it would be around four thousand bucks! So assuming we can do it (knock on hardwood) it’ll certainly add up to some serious money saved. So our hardwoods are ordered and we have a whole mess of blue trim to paint. We’d like to buy a paint sprayer and try our hand at that, so we will keep you posted. Should be interesting…
More Flooring Projects
If you would like to read about other flooring projects we have done, please check out the posts below:
