Our Home Part - 6

One of the biggest differences between expensive engineered hardwood flooring and the cheap stuff is the size of the planks. The cheap stuff has a way of wording their sizes that make it sound bigger “full length 50%-75%“ , but if you map that out, one long board is 400% the length of a short one, so the language is a little deceiving. I must admit I was a little shocked at how many short planks came in a box. There was 1 long, 1 medium, and a ton of really short. You just can’t make these short pieces look good. They only work at the walls, making the appearance that they were cut. But there are many more than that.

I started out by opening all the boxes of flooring and organising them by size. The long ones run down the hallways and the larger rooms. The medium ones go in the smaller rooms. And the short ones I’ve set aside: They are going in Jeremy’s studio. (No offence dear, but there’s a lot of wires, lights, and buttons in there; no one is looking at the floor.)

I discovered another difference with the cheap flooring: the colouring is quite inconsistent. Some planks we more yellow, while others were the pale nutty brown I thought I was getting, and some had both. I spent time matching the colours together so that the colour differences appear to change in waves across the floor as opposed to being blocky and patchy which would have happened if I just laid them down without paying attention.

Doing things like this is what keeps me going with the DIY. I really would like to hire someone to get this project finished, but I can’t afford the quality I want. It would be impossible to convince a builder to do it this way because it takes a lot more time, and is really quite annoying.

So I’m keeping at it.

Next up trim and doors.