Sigh of relief.

One thing.

We are completely happy with this one thing that we’ve hired contractors to do so far in this house.

The floors.

They look amazing.

They seriously are a game-changer in this house.

Between the door openings and these floors, we now own what feels like a completely different house.

We had a couple of snafus, or mis-communications, during the work … but everything turned out okay.

I wanted the stair risers finished, but turns out that they can’t be finished in their current state … so they would have needed to replace them all. Had I known this up front, I would have paid the extra price. I didn’t know this up front (and neither did they), so we left them unfinished. The risers will be painted. *Fine*

The baseboards in certain construction areas had not yet been replaced when they needed to start installing the floors. They installed the wood too close to the walls in these areas, and it became a little hassle. Our floors are just slightly higher than the original floors were, making our baseboards about ¼” to ½” lower than the floor, but the door frames all exactly right (weird, but it happened). So, with the new wood installed right up to the wall, the baseboards needed to be rip-cut or installed higher than the rest (obviously this second one is not a legit option). So, we had them install the baseboards around most of the areas that needed to be height-adjusted. I installed a couple of the easy height-adjusted baseboards, and also the remaining baseboards and door framing, around their floors. It was a little bit of a timing snag and work around, but none of this will be noticeable at all once the shoe molding goes in next week.

Note … They are installing shoe molding next week, giving me time to prime & paint the baseboards beforehand.

We ended up going with just an oil-based polyurethane on the unstained, red oak floors. We had planned on using the same stain as our current house floors on the new house floors. We still really love our current floors. They are also amazing. But, our current floors are either white oak (probably), or the wood has just colored and weathered over their 100 year life … giving the same color stain a very different look. We didn’t like how dark brown and monotone the color was on the new floors. We tested a handful of stain colors, and just really liked the natural, lighter look with no stain, just poly, floors. Plus, with the rest of the design scheme we have planned, these floors will steal the show. 😊

So … (without shoe molding) … here are the almost finished floors.

(Notice how the color really changes based on the light and time of day in the room … We love that about this finished look.)

(*Also, don’t mind the dust on the floors … the cleaning crew got a lot of drywall dust off of the walls, but some of it ended up on the floors. They really are shiny, but in some of the pictures, they are dulled by the dust. We’ll clean that up and they’ll be gorgeous once again.)

See, we still need to get baseboard down in there.

(That stain at the very top … that’s the exact same stain brand & color as our current floors. We went with the large area poly in the bottom right.)

We had select grade, red oak planks installed throughout the main level, upstairs hallway, and master bedroom. The 3 guest rooms upstairs already had red oak planks, but they were common grade. You can see in these pictures that the common planks have more noticeable dark grain and knots in them. I really like the way they look, but I think I’m glad the whole house isn’t this drastic.