Out with the soft, in with the hard

Posted on Sep 25, 2007 in Misc. | 2 comments

It’s done. Finally. It wasn’t easy, but it’s done and we have many people to thank for bringing it about. I’m talking about our new bamboo flooring. Let’s start at the beginning…

Why get new flooring?

I bought my condo in 2001 as its second owner. The carpet was even then less-than-stellar. Six years later, it’d been a couple years since I’d been complaining about how we needed to replace it. After it became clear that we would be staying in the condo another year or two, we began the odyssey of looking online and at big-box hardware retailers this past spring. (As an aside: why do people clean, paint, and re-floor their homes when they sell? Sure, to increase its appeal to buyers… but why not do it a while before you move so you can enjoy it?).

We decided on bamboo flooring after checking out many samples of it and its also-renewable cousin, cork. I liked cork, but to obtain it for less than $5/sq.ft. required your floor look like a second-rate bulletin board. Bamboo offered the natural look we wanted and could be purchased for around $3/sq.ft.

I won’t go into the story here (but I will soon in another post), but suffice it to say we chose an online flooring company whose excellent website belied its horrible, horrible customer service.

Installation: or, what not to do

Prep was easy. Proving that destruction is always easier than creation, pulling up and cutting our old, worn-down carpet was not only cathartic but kind of fun. Removing the wall moulding was much more pain-staking since we needed to re-use it. But still, with a wedge, a hammer, and some shivs, they were off pretty quickly.

When the flooring (finally) arrived, we had our “installation party,” thinking it’d be a snap. It was snap-together, glueless, floating floor after all. Furniture was moved, lots of power tools were standing by, and the bare Gypcrete was calling out for some new clothes. What could go wrong?

Lots. It was fine to snap in the boards together in the long hallway. But when we came to the wall, with its many doorjambs and right angles, it got tricky. We measured twice and cut once, but when we banged another board into the mass of engineered bamboo, the whole thing shifted and moved our cut outs. Nor could we figure out how to bang the boards together when we’d reached the edge of the hallway (we didn’t have one of those lovely tools that enable this to be done; we in fact had no idea we needed it).

So we pulled the plug before it got too far. We knew we were over our heads and decided to call in reinforcements.

Hire a professional

It’s sound advice, which I’m happy to say we heeded. Luckily, our good friend Joe had a friend who had done plenty of floor installations. We called Josh and within a few days he was here rescuing us from our own (flooring) incompetence.

One of the things the professional told us that the flooring company didn’t was that 30%, not 10%, is a good estimate of additional flooring beyond your measurements. Had we known that, we’d not have run out of flooring as we did… with only a few strips remaining to cover. But we were almost there and things were looking good, so the prospect of dealing with the flooring company again was tolerable. (Josh had already confirmed he couldn’t order the same material through one of his suppliers.) It arrived via FedEx, unannounced (another reason to read my upcoming post about the flooring company) the following weekend and Josh finished the job.

Devil in the Details

Once the flooring was in, we nailed the trim pieces back on. The trick to this was our 3/8″ trim didn’t leave much room for any gapping, but it ended up looking pretty good. The trim wasn’t in very good shape after all those years supporting dust, then being unceremoniously ripped from the walls, only to be slammed back in with pneumatically-driven nails. Luckily, more help arrived: my dad, Stu, to resurrect his painting skills. Our trim now looks brand new thanks to his steady hand and a couple of quarts of latex.

One thing that this new flooring has taught us: we have to not sweat the small stuff. Hard surfaces can—and do—dent. We can try our best not to drop things off the counter, remove our shoes at the tiled entryway, and put felt under our furniture legs. But sure enough, we’ve already got a few nice trenches and craters that just couldn’t be helped. My solution? Let it go… or at least try.

A cast of thousands a dozen

We couldn’t have completed this project without lots of help from our friends and family. Thanks everyone! They are, in order of appearance:

• Joe and Heather (painting and prep)
• Larry and Susie (prep)
• Dylan (aborted first install)
• Damien, Beth, and in-utero Django (aborted first install)
• Josh (actual install)
• Stu (trim paint)