New wood floor installation

Hello home renovation enthusiasts! I haven't had a chance to update this blog in a while, so my wonderful husband was nice enough to write a few guest posts. Here's his first post about our new wood floors:

Unfortunately, the house has two incompatible types of wood floor, pine in the living room and one of the bedrooms, some type of blonde plank flooring with a sort of laminated sheen to it in the kitchen. We preferred the warm, worn-in, natural look of the pine floors in the living room, so decided to install that in the addition and the existing smaller carpeted bedroom, which will soon be my office.

The type of wood would have to be knotty white pine, which is commonly used as sub-flooring because it is soft and easily marred and cheap for that matter. "Heart of Pine" is a better choice because of its pretty grain and hardness, but you pay for that.

The flooring is harvested and milled locally, leaving a minimal carbon footprint from the wood's origin to our home. Our contractor, Joe Rapp, is big on keeping things local, so are we.

The freshly milled wood was delivered several weeks prior to installing so that it could cure. The kids were fascinated by these strange obstacles.

The level of the sub-flooring was slightly lower in the addition, and the floor guys had to taper the new flooring higher in the hallway to butt perfectly with the wood in the kitchen/dining area. It looks like they installed a series of shims.

We don't like carpet, especially brown carpet, so it was removed from the smallest room in the existing portion of the house.

We used the following materials to transition the pine with the other flooring:

Common bath: marble saddle

Master bath: thin nickel bead

Hallway: perpendicular slat of flooring

Eventually, we'd like to replace the floors in the kitchen and dining area. My beautiful and clever wife (who may or may not be editing this before she publishes it) and I assumed this was engineered wood because it looks plastic and weird, but our contractor says it's not. Too bad I can't remember what type of wood he said it actually is.

After the new wood was installed it was poly coated. The contractors asked us to refrain from walking on the new floors for three weeks until they were conditioned. Here's another shot of our daughters hanging out with the flooring.

The new floors looked incredible! Almost too good, because the wood was installed so tightly and seamlessly that it looked like glass. The color of the wood is a very pale yellow, and we're told it will darken with age to the tone of the existing wood floors. The planks may separate slightly and will accumulate plenty of scars over the years. My wife wants to paint the floors in our bedroom white, but I'm not so sure...

According to my wife I need to wrap this post up properly with a closing statement -- lessons learned or whatever. She said I could also just tell you what the next post will be about so tune in next time to hear about rafters.