It's Great To Be Home

Race to the {Re}Finish Line

Yesterday’s post left off with all of our stuff piled to the ceilings and us stashed away at my parents’ house while our floors are being refinished {and new wood floors are installed in my office!}.

Before they could install the new floors in my office, the floor guys had to chip up the old subfloor – just like the rest of our house, the subfloor in the office was made out of particle board which is a big no-no for hardwood floors since it will disintegrate if it gets wet. Looks fun, right?

Once the new subfloor was in, the new hardwoods could be installed!

Actually, they aren’t new wood floors in my office at all – we actually decided to go with reclaimed wood floors for a few reasons: (1) they’re about $1 a foot cheaper than new wood, (2) we liked the thought of having floors with a bit of history and saving them from the ol’ garbage pile, and (3) they’re actually higher quality than new wood floors because they’re from back in the day when floors were made of nicer grade of wood. Worked for us!

After the floors were in everything got sealed off with sheets of plastic – sanding is a dusty business, even though our floor guys were using a “dust-free” system where the majority of the dust is sucked into a vacuum cleaner as the floors are sanded.

I think the sanding is my favorite part – the floors went from looking a little sad and damaged to looking brand-spanking new! This photo kind of gives you an idea of the transformation the sanding is having on our floors:

Have you guys had any drama with your hardwood floors? I love’em, but my fingers are crossed that this is the only issue we ever have with them. The floor saga will continue tomorrow, so stay tuned!

P.S. Don’t forget to enter the giveaway! Click here to enter until midnight on Sunday, August 8.

Flashback: Sub-Par Subfloors

Once demo was complete on our house and we had salvaged the carpet to be used later, we got a bit of a nasty surprise. Our subfloors were sub-par.

In a perfect world, all subfloors should be made of plywood, which is strong, durable and made of a single piece of wood. Instead, our subfloors were made of particle board – not so great for a subfloor. Particle board is made of wood chips that are glued together and compressed – that means that a subfloor made of particle board will basically disintegrate if it gets wet – eek!!

Since we were putting down hardwood floors in a majority of the house, the particle board subfloors were an even bigger concern for us – as you all know, hardwood floors can get expensive and we didn’t want all of our money to go down the drain if our subfloor got wet. So, we sucked it up and sprung for new subfloors everywhere that we were installing wood floors or tile. We chose to keep the particle board in the areas that were staying carpeted (just three bedrooms) since these rooms were unlikely to get wet and carpeting would be relatively inexpensive to replace.

Once the decision had been made to replace the subfloors, the old particle board had to be chipped up – a nasty, messy job.

The black moisture barrier, a plastic tarp which is designed to keep moisture from the crawl space away from the subfloors, then had to be removed. Once that layer came up, we were greeted with a series of lovely holes where water damage had caused the plank subflooring to completely deteriorate in some places.