I love my checks. Love them. (This, by the way, is an old shot, pre-replacement of orange chair with amazing thrift-store find and acquisition of chevron rug.)
They’re part of the reason I fell in love with the house in the first place.
But we’ve decided we need to get rid of them for a bunch of reasons:
1) While they’re an amazing decor element, they’re not really working with the overall look that I’d like to move towards (airy and a little rustic); and
2) They’re a total disaster, all chipped and scuffed, and when I brought someone in to talk about repainting them I was told that the wood is pretty cheap and flimsy, and really isn’t worth the labor of repainting/refinishing.
So I headed over to the Home Depot, and spent a couple of hours asking a very patient man thousands of extremely elementary questions.
Here’s what I gathered:
There are two basic types of flooring – laminate and hardwood. Laminate is cheaper and easier to install, but doesn’t do a ton for your property value and can run the risk of looking a little fake (although high-quality laminates can actually look respectably close to the real thing).
Hardwood is a fortune, is super labor-intensive to install (we’d have to move out for a little over a week while we ripped out our old floors entirely and rebuilt them, sanded them, and stained them), and is a fortune. Did I mention it’s a fortune?
But! According to the Home Depot guy, apparently there’s a sort of in-between option called “Engineered Wood”, which lays over your old floors like laminate (so the installation process is about a day and a half), but looks and feels much more like hardwood (which the top layer, at least, actually is) and can have a similarly positive impact on your property value. The cost of the product is similar to the cost of hardwood, but since the installation process is so much simpler you save lots of money on labor.
I think I have that right…?
I also might totally not have that right. If you know more about this than I (which, if you know anything at all about this stuff, is likely), please feel free to chime in.
So. My plan is to redo the floors in the living room in a light color (so that the overall feel is nice and airy), but retain the character of the house I fell in love with by leaving the checks on the upstairs level (where they’re less worn). One day in the far-off future, I’d like to redo the foyer in black-and-white marble tile.
Above are some of the options I’m considering for the living room floor. I like the cherry wood closest to my toes the best, but am also considering the lightest swatch (the one top center).
Any opinions?
