Getting there (yes, another wood floor post)

A quick progress update on the wood floor thing I've mentioned once or twice on this site"

Now that we've got the flooring figured out an order has been placed to 1A Flooring for about 650 square feet of the stuff. How long it'll take to get here from Massachusetts is anybody's guess. Maybe next week. Anyway they had the best price and came out ahead in shipping. They also deliver it to the curb which will help out a lot (as opposed to picking it up at a terminal in my Celica and testing the car's load limits like I used to do in college at the end of the semester when it was time to move out).

The other big material item we'll need is the glue. While searching for who actually sells the stuff Kahrs recommends google pointed me towards a Craigslist posting. This was no ordinary posting - it was from here in San Antonio and made two days earlier. Long story short, I got a killer deal on the exact amount of glue I'll need from someone who ordered too much when they did their own place. Sometimes you get lucky.

So this weekend if there's time between football and group projects we might be able to start demolition - removing the furniture, carpet, padding, and tack strip from the two rooms the wood is going in. I'd like to scratch up the concrete so the glue will hold better and get to work on the low spots, while waiting for a couple of moisture tests to run. To test for moisture in the concrete slab I plan on duct taping some plastic to the concrete and checking for discoloration and moisture in a couple of days. We should also be able to remove the baseboards and number them so it's clear which one goes where.

I'm also hoping the original owners can make it over this weekend - they said they wanted to see the place again and bring along some pictures of what it used to look like. They'd probably have a better time having a look around before or after all this work begins.

There will be plenty of details and pictures when we get to work. It should be any day now!

Research is sometimes harder than the actual job

The entire time since my last post (ok... and for many months before it) I've spent countless hours searching and learning about wood flooring. The installation and preparation process isn't that hard to understand. But actually finding the right flooring, that's the hard part!

One resource I've used heavily is http://www.ifloor.com - their prices aren't the best around but they are one of the few sites out there who understand that for something tangible like wood flooring that they're asking you to spend thousands of dollars on, having a way to get samples to hold and look at in person is important! We're looking for a wood that varies between chocolate and blonde. In other words, no red / orange color. So that means we're basically looking for American Walnut (the Brazilian kind has too much green). Anyway we ordered a couple of samples, which came back in just a few days and were a bit disappointed. The Kahrs flooring which looked so great and varied online was a bit on the uniform side when you hold a 6x4in sample in your hand.

So this morning we went to Lumber Liquidators to see a large selection of flooring in person. The Bellawood 3/4in thick solid walnut looked great in the 6x6 foot square they installed in the store and comes with a 50 year warranty. So we're close to a decision but in the back of my mind I'm thinking "solid wood can't be installed on a concrete subfloor... can it?" After 2 minutes of research on their website after coming home I find out that it can only be installed on a wood subfloor (in other words, we would have an inch between every room downstairs and the places I am replacing the flooring), and that glue-down installations void the warranty. That's not an option, but all is not lost...

When I put today's samples next to the other one that looked a bit plain Elle and I noticed that they look completely identical. I pop back on the Kahrs site and the picture of the room they had looks exactly the same as the one I took of the nice-looking 6x6 foot section in the store that we liked!

Looks like I'll be ordering about 640 square feet of Kahrs Walnut Montreal / 3-strip flooring within the next few days! I'm glad the search is over!