Okay, I'm being dramatic. Kinda. There are far worse things in the world than messing up your floors. I've lived through a few of them. However, I'm still a human, I occasionally lose perspective, and I definitely spent a few days drenching poor little Cheese's fur with my tears.
Here's what happened.
I was determined to have dark floors in our house. I wanted them so bad. I looked at picture after picture of houses with dark floors, and I just knew that our house was meant to have dark floors.
I imagined something like this:
via Style Me Pretty
Or this.
via Houzz
And then our flooring was installed.
And
since we used solid hardwood vs engineered hardwood, it was fully
installed as unfinished wood (without the stain applied yet), and I had a
chance to see what our house would look like with natural floors.
And I loved it.
It really made our 1970's house look light and bright and beautiful.
But,
then self-doubt and insecurity raced in and ate me alive. I felt like I
should do what everyone else does, rather than do what works best for
me, and it felt scary to go against the norm. Plus, my original vision
was dark floors, and it was so hard to change course mid-race.
In short, I could see with my own eyes that the light flooring looked really great in our house, and yet I ignored myself.
I am woman. Hear me roar.
So, anyways, I pushed forward with my irrationally dark flooring plan.
I eventually settled on a dark brown stain called 'Kona'.
In
hindsight, I can totally see the doom that was headed my way. But, at
the time, I was totally lost in the moment, dirty dancing on Kona's leg.
It looked so great when we tested the stain on a small piece of our flooring. I moved it around into each of the rooms and stared at it for several days while the flooring was finished being installed.
Again, in
hindsight, this was a terrible way to make a decision. A tiny poptart of
dark wood does not give you an accurate indication of what your ENTIRE
house will look like with wall to wall dark floors.
But, ultimately, I gave the go ahead for the stain, and when I came home that day, here's what our floors looked like.
It wasn't the worst thing ever. But it definitely wasn't good.
And it was just so gloomy.
I knew I had made a mistake.
I had inadvertently created a 1970's dungeon.
The stain turned out kinda orange (which still baffles me), and it didn't take well to the solid hardwood at all. It ended up being blotchy and uneven, and basically, I hated it.
When this all started, I had no idea about the differences between solid and engineered flooring, but I definitely do now.
In
a nutshell, solid hardwood flooring is higher quality, but it's really
difficult to get that uniform color that you would get with really dark
engineered flooring, because you have to stain most solid hardwood
flooring on site. You can buy already stained solid hardwood floors, but
that was not in my little budget.
There's
about a million more things you should know about solid vs. engineering
hardwoods (and about a million more options) but my plan is to share
that info in another post. Otherwise this post will take you 42 years to
read.
So,
even though the stain looked terrible, there was a bit of a silver
lining in the stain debacle...I was able to see once and for all that
our house looked bad with dark floors.
Because even if they had been a lighter brown, or even just a uniform color, it wouldn't have mattered.
I love dark hardwood floors, but not in our house.
So don't get mad at me if you have dark floors. Clearly, I wanted a set of my own.
It just wasn't meant to be.
It was around this time that Cheese's fur got soaked with eyeball secretions.
Could I have phrased that any worse?
I had no idea what on earth I was going to do. Do I apply for Paraguayan citizenship? Do I buy 800 rugs, admit defeat, and just pretend like none of this ever happened?
None
of those options seemed viable, so instead I just moped around for a
few days and eventually mustered the courage to tell our contractor that
we weren't happy.
Okay, fine, Jesse did it.
But,
anyways, our contractor was wonderful about the entire thing, and he
agreed to sand the floors back down to the natural wood. He
didn't know I have a blog (not that that necessarily would've
mattered...I'm not Beyonce). He's just a nice guy who wants to make sure
his customers are happy.
Of course, we were already at week 5 in the renovation, and this new phase of sanding/sealing tacked on 2 more weeks.
Oh, joyous day.
So, the sanding began. Again.
I
was feeling pretty panicked at this point, and searching for
yacht-sized rugs online, but I did my best to remain patient and hope
for the best.
After about a week, most of the stain was sanded off, I began to see the natural wood again, and I remembered how to breathe.
There
was still stain all over the walls (which will all be repainted and
covered down at the bottom with trim anyways), and just a tiny little
bit still in the wood grain, but I could definitely see a light at the
end of the tunnel.
Still though, we were going into week 7, and I began to feel a little meltdown-ey.
My
fridge and oven were outside on the front deck with a tarp over them.
The washer and dryer were next to my bed. And I was still basically
living at this place.
At one point, I replaced my floor vents and just left the old disgusting ones on my kitchen counters for a week.
Full of bugs and dust circa 1975.
It is what it is.
Luckily, right around the same time as my meltdown, we had plans to get out of town for a week.
We
drove to Charleston to watch my little brother, Mathias, graduate from
the Navy Nuclear Power School, where he's studying to become a Nuclear
Engineer.
I'm
so proud of him, he's my favorite creature on the earth, 10 years
younger than me, and it basically healed my soul to spend a little time
with him.
I know he's just some random dude in a dapper sailor suit to you, but trust me, to know Mathias is to love Mathias.
I have yet to find the exception.
Jesse almost loves him even more than me, which is demonstrated by the above picture.
They
intentionally posed that way, and even barked at me to get out of the
picture so that they could capture this celebratory day with a prom
photo.
This is my life.
When that was over, Jesse and I headed to Myrtle Beach so that he could attend a work convention. He worked, I slothed
on the beach. Then on the last day, Mathias and Meredith (his
girlfriend that I also love) drove down from Charleston and Myrtled it
up with us for the evening.
They all ate oysters. I did not.
It was glorious.
Just so you know, I will eat anything. Unless it resembles a loogie.
I just got really sidetracked on a brother/beach tangent. So sorry.
Anyways, I came back with a new zest for life, which is good, because I was really fading fast.
By
the time we came home, our floors had been sealed with several layers
of satin topcoat, and were finally finished (at least on the main
level).
I jumped up and down for a full 42 minutes.
Just to really hammer home what an improvement this really is, here's our house when we first moved in:
And here we are today.
It's a floor mini-miracle.
And,
luckily I captured the miracle when we first got home. Because the very
next day, it was filled back up with stuff for the entryway.
And it kinda still looks like this.
But the good news is that I finally have floors that I love, and we finally have lift off in the entryway pit.
It only took 8 little weeks to get to this point.