Out with the carpet, and in with the wood floors.

When we were first purchasing this historic craftsman, we thought we could get away with keeping the carpet. For what we could tell during the home inspection a good steam could go along way. Of course, its so hard to tell with someone else’s furniture and things. As you can see below. Carpet looked okay.

We did not have much time between vacating our now rental, and moving into this space. We had to figure some things out.

That meant moving into our home and leaving the two bedrooms untouched. Yes, sleeping in the living room. Turns out the carpet was in way worse shape then we were comfortable with. Out it had to go.

We pulled back a corner of the carpet to find original wood, and through we could get lucky like our old home and just refinish the floors. Turns out one we pulled all the carpet up, we actually did not have hardwood all the way across. We had plywood with cracks letting air and light in from our large crawl space.

This meant new installation of hardwood.

First, my husband John and I ripped out the carpet and actually just tossed it out or window to our long driveway. We got some pretty funny video of that.

Once we had cleared our the space, we worked to match the new wood floors width and length of the rest of the homes wood floors. We decided to go with a water based stain to keep the oak floors light and bright as these were bedrooms with lots of natural light.

This reduced a lot of the shine and amber tones you can find in oil finishes. We knew it would not match the rest of the home exactly, but that most people would not notice as the kitchen tile visually separated the two wood areas.

The final result was better then expected.

Loving the water based oak floors. Pippa does too.