Wood Flooring

When we bought the house, the entire 3rd floor (bedrooms level) was covered in a "beautiful" blue carpet. I have nothing agains area rugs, but carpets I just don't understand. The amount of dust, bugs and dirt they collect always scares me.

Our budget might be low, but removing the existing carpet and installing wood flooring was a priority.

Selecting wood flooring for your house it's a very important decisions: durability and beauty has to be equally important. We researched and compared engineered, laminated and hardwood and discovered the hardwoods are the best choice. A prefinished, engineered or laminated flooring will be harder to maintain or to match the finish in the future.

We selected white oak flooring grade 2 (we love the nots and imperfections). To stain it we used Minwax Natural Color and to finish it: Bova. I strongly recommend using a water based finish product (like Bova) to finish your floors. An oil based finish can off-gas for up to a year.

Please see below some images during installation and with the final product.

Work in progress

Master Bedroom

Corridor

Master Bedroom & Closet

Finished product

Enlarged finished woof floor

Closet 2

I've been very busy lately and I didn't have time to post, but a lot of things happened on the house so I will try to share them with you today and tomorrow. Tony has been working quite a lot on the house and most of the demo and build-out is DONE! Thank you for all our amazing friends that stopped by to help us.

I will start with the walk-in closet. As you remember last week, I posted about the existing 2' wide closet in the Master bedroom. Obviously, that didn't work, so we tore it down and enlarged the size of the Master bedroom.

Demolished closet

The Master Bedroom was now 14' x 20', too large for us. A bedroom is suppose to be cosy and comfortable. We intend to locate the bed where the existing closet was, so we can have beautiful views of the park every morning we wake up.  On the North side of the bedroom, there was now a large area with no windows or obtrusions (see in the picture below).

"dead space"

In this area, Tony and our dear friend Ionel, framed a new wall with a pocket door, and created a 5' wide room. The pocket door frame used is Johnson Hardware 1500 Series, easy to install,and very durable.

The Master Bedroom is still large at 14 x 14' - 7 1/2" but now we also have a large 5x 14' walk-in closet. Happy girl!

Walk-in closet in progress

Closet 1

Our future home had a very small 2' wide closet in the master bedroom. That was not acceptable!

First step, demolish the existing closet wall. Tony did an amazing job tonight. He took out the folding door, sheetrock, framing and now we have a larger open master bedroom.

Stay tuned to see how we will change the layout of the Master Bedroom and build a large walk-in-closet :)

Design phase

The excitement you feel when you step into your home for the first time it’s overwhelming. We like this house as we did the first time we saw it and we know it's the perfect home for us.

House numbers and purple walls

Tony and I are very anxious to start working on our future home. We have (2) months before the due date (move date), and we would like to finish as many project as possible until then. Both of us have full time jobs (very busy at work ) so we will have to do most of the work over the weekends. As we tackle each space we will share before, during and after pictures. We will have to hire a few professionals along the way (electrician, plumber, etc), but most of the work will be done by us (AKA Tony) and, hopefully, our friends :)

We started the design process long before we close on the house