Baby to Bee: Absolutely Floored

When Aaron and I were living in our first house, we dreamed of one day putting down hardwood floors. Both for aesthetics and resale value. One pre-kid day while browsing Home Depot, we discovered hardwood tile. So it offered the ease of tile-floor cleaning (if something spills, wipe it up-- which cannot always occur with hardwoods due to potential warping of the wood), with the look of hardwood that we liked. It was also much cheaper per square foot than hardwoods.

A while later, my parents switched from carpet to hardwoods in their dining room (yes, their dining room was carpet!), living room, and hallway. They chose a laminate hardwood due to its durability from dog toe-nail scratches. The installer told them that since they had a concrete slab foundation, real hardwoods wouldn't have worked based on the type of foundation and our level of humidity down here.

So Aaron and I wouldn't have been able to get pure hardwoods anyway, due to our home being on a concrete slab.

We pushed the idea of flooring out of our heads for a while (read: years) and did other fixer-upper things around the house like painting, installing cabinet and draw handles, a new kitchen sink faucet, and contracting out a screened porch for our patio space. We loved all of these changes but knew we wanted to sell the house so that we could get in the school district we loved prior to our children starting school.

Our house sold despite having carpet in the living room and hallway. :) We purchased a home that had very plush carpet in the living room (no need for a yoga mat when doing workouts!), 12"x12" ceramic tiles in the kitchen (white tile with black grout-- who does that?!?), floating hardwood floors in the dining room and hallway (which are not rooms that connect, so there's a combination of ceramic tile (foyer) and plush carpet (living room) in between the two bouts of laminate floating floors), and a very short-hair carpet in all four bedrooms, with the same white ceramic kitchen tile in the bathrooms. The backdoor to the deck is in the living room, but I'm sure the previous owners didn't want their dog getting wet paws all over the carpet during storms, so they extended the dining room's floating hardwoods into the living room to create a hardwood space by the door. I see the reasoning, but it made the living room's flooring choppy to the eye and detracted from the available floor space.

Shortly after moving in, we made a "dream list" of projects to do around this house knowing that we're going to live here a while. We lived with the flooring for two years before deciding this spring to leap and go ahead and change out all the floating hardwoods and the living room plush carpet (which I loved, but knew the plushness wouldn't last). We priced out the flooring and chose our preferred color & texture of tile (it feels like real hardwood-- it isn't slick like kitchen tile), and matching grout. We were excited about the price point and scheduled the flooring to take place over a weekend in April.

We stayed with my parents during the weekend while the flooring was finished, and we got to come home on Sunday evening. We are so impressed with how it looks and absolutely love our choice! Our living room isn't as dusty as it was, which is good for Noah with his allergies. We bought a walker for Avery the day after the floors were complete, and she loves zipping around the loop from the kitchen, through the dining room, and back through the living room. (Well, she enjoys it when she actually lets me put her in her walker!)

The boys like the perpetual race track feel of the floors and love playing with their toy cars and trucks in the living room and hallway.

Since we eliminated the choppy break-up between the living room and dining room, we have a clear line of sight now and it makes our space seem so much bigger! We're really happy with our choice and hopefully this will motivate us to save up for future projects (like Master bath reno, or a screened porch on part of our deck!).

Here's a view from the living room into the dining room pre-floor change. You can see the hardwood area by the backdoor.