5.5.16

For those of you on Facebook, you know about our flooring issues.  For those who are not (and to document for my posterity :)), here's what happened.

We ordered beautiful distressed bamboo flooring in February.  This is what it looks like:

We so fell in love with the floor that we designed our entire kitchen around it (including the cabinets and countertops and paint).  After a series of mishaps, they finally delivered all the flooring and we needed to bring it into the living room so it could acclimate to our house before installation--which was THREE WEEKS after it arrived and after the rest of the kitchen was essentially done.  Not happy.  BUT the floor installer showed up on Monday (5/2) and scheduled two days to install it all.  We're getting the full kitchen, living room, hall, and closets (3) all re-done and all in bamboo.  Or so we thought...  

If you've thought about using bamboo flooring, here's something you should know: it acts like a sponge, absorbing and bleeding water depending on the humidity level of the house.  So if you will be installing bamboo, you must have a whole house humidifier.  We don't.

Also, nail-down (or glue-down) hardwood floors require a perfectly level subfloor.  60 year old houses don't have a perfectly level subfloor.  So you'd need a floating floor.

Yes, we had chosen glue-down bamboo.  Completely incompatible with our house.  And we tore up everything in every room and moved our furniture and emptied the fridge...  And we still have no floors.

Today at least the company we bought the materials from came to pick up the flooring and all the other installation products.  I'm a bit frustrated that their salespeople don't know enough to explain the issues with bamboo to their customers.  But I'm refraining from saying anything else until I know how they will fix this for us.  We went and picked out alternate flooring materials and (unbelievably) they required the floor measure guy to come back out again to re-measure for the new floor.  We still don't have a quote or know if the materials we've chosen will be acceptable or not.  And therefore they haven't been ordered and we don't have an install date.  And our first floor remains empty, echoey, and lonely.

BUT everything else is coming along well.  I turned an old blind into a roman shade:

Try not to notice that it's a little short--I won't often have it down all the way

Here's how it looks rolled up.

The painters finished today and I cannot be more excited about how it all turned out!  :)  The lighting might not be that great, but the whole first floor (plus both stairwells) are combinations of brown, teal, and off-white, with white trim.

Looking up the basement stairs

Service door

LOVE how the cabinets look against the teal

This makes me so happy.

Patio door (with new curtain just installed today) to the right

That brown makes me swoon

Love the pantry set-up (they have slide-out shelves)

looking out of the kitchen into the hall

A nice touch the painter suggested--painting our wood tone photo shelves black

Love this combo of colors in the built-in

And I am way too excited about how the stairwell going to the second floor turned out.  Photos don't do it justice

Looking down from the second floor

As I said, we put up the patio door curtain today.  Greg also spent time the last week replacing all our off-white (and dirty) outlets with white ones.  He will do the same with the light switches this weekend.  Everything looks so nice and sparkly new!

I hope to hear about flooring installation tomorrow.  And I hope it gets wrapped up quickly.  The patio and outdoor work will hopefully be started in two weeks.  We just might have this project done in time for a graduation party...