I’m a little behind here and I apologize for that. It’s been a busy few months and that doesn’t even touch on my house projects. But I’m back at it and want to keep going on documenting everything I’m doing with my new house.
Bye, bye asbesto! I no longer have ugly, dirty carpet, or tan and brown, cafeteria tile. I have beautiful honey bamboo flooring!
I guess it was back in March (like I said a little behind here) I started the process of ripping up the dirty carpet that was throughout my upstairs. Now, I knew the carpet was dirty- you could see the outline of where the furniture had been, which is honestly fairly normal when you’ve had carpet for so long and furniture in the same place. BUT, I guess when you’ve lived with this carpet for many many years, maybe you forget what it looked like and don’t realize how dirty it is. It’s like the difference between watching a child grow from age 4-6. If you watch them grow everyday, the changes seem small, from day to day you don’t see the differences. But if you see the child at age 4 and then not until age 6, those changes are extreme. I guess over time you don’t realize your carpet completely changes color. So when I was pulling this carpet up, and with it, the threshold pieces for each room, it revealed to me what the carpet looked like when it was first installed and wow, is it crazy. Pictured below is a close up of the awesome (sarcasm) products used in my house. Top: bathroom floor, which I will be living with for at least a year, Bottom: existing, exposed carpet, Middle: untouched, unexposed carpet underneath the bathroom threshold. It used to be WHITE (well pinkish white)! And is now a gross, brown, gray. It felt so nice to pull that up.
So the hardwood. I thought on this product for awhile. I knew I didn’t want laminate but I also didn’t want to spend $6/sq foot. This was actually the first product I found and liked and knew I could afford. But it took me about 2 months to buy it, I just wasn’t sure, I was afraid I’d change my mind on the color. Well naturally by the time I decided to buy it, Home Depot decided not to carry it in stores anymore. So after almost getting it .75 cents cheaper a sq/ft I bought it full price. Which I was planning on paying anyway, but when you think you can get it $300 cheaper, its kind of hard to let go of that.
As much as I like to do things myself and go through the process of learning something new, I don’t do math and laying flooring involves a lot of math. My dad and his two neighbors helped me out and it amazed me how they would yell measurements and terminology to each other and they would just get it right (for the most part). I don’t think they would have appreciated me yelling 13 inches and 5 ticks, on the side with the groove. I went to art school, they don’t even have math class there.
So since I’m not a master floor layer, I’m not going to pretend a tutorial here will help anyone, so here are just some pretty pictures of my new floors.
Below: Bye, bye, dirty, dirty carpet! The boys wanted to toss this out the window to dispose of it, on my tiny narrow street instead of walking it down the stairs. I was a little worried that if they did that there would just be clouds of dirty carpet dusty filling my street. Boys…
Below: 18 boxes of flooring, which after seeing my friend’s stack, I realized is nowhere near a lot.
Below: Pretty honey wood
Below: My floors!
Tip: Splurge on the underlayment, it’s really not even a splurge.
The one thing I did learn, and I’m not calling anyone out here, but I was told that using an underlayment material wasn’t necessary, and while, yes, that might be true for some houses, I don’t think it was good for mine. I have UNBELIEVABLY slanted floors, like legit I have to chop off some furniture legs to make sure things don’t slide off end tables, or position my bed so I don’t roll right off. Because of this I think there are places I could have used a material to even things out. I did notice this halfway through laying the flooring but ya know, too little too late. I was able to stick some in certain places so there wasn’t like a big dip, but you can definitely tell I could have used more. Not to mentioned the flooring against the tile could use a little noise barrier. But like I said, too little, too late and it’s really not too bad. Overall I’m super happy with it, it looks awesome for a pretty great price.