This post is sponsored by Build Direct.
Without question the hardest room to remodel in our #newoldmtnhome was our kitchen and family open floor plan room. Remodeling is hard all by itself, but when it comes to remodeling a foreclosure and an older one at that, it becomes way more complicated.
I mean…it turned out far beyond my wildest dreams.
Just so you know, I can dream a whole lot and did for this room, and it still surpassed my dreams.
I feel like I could be Fraulein Maria from the Sound of Music. I want to sing from the mountain tops & twirl with happiness.
But it wasn’t always like this.
We were in the trenches and had many valleys to journey through as well. Just to refresh your memory or in case you’re visiting this blog for the first time. We bought a foreclosure that had sat vacant for 4+ years. We knew it would be a challenge. Especially this room, but we had no idea what we were about to get ourselves into.
I guess you never really know “everything” when you buy an older home, do you?
This room was an add-on that the previous owner had built. The tile was cracked and broken in various places. The first time I walked into this room, even before we made an offer, I had already visioned it with some kind of hardwood flooring.
You see, I have no problem visualizing a room, and how it could look.
Images of pretty things and beautiful furnishings just pop up in my head like magic.
My husband happens to call that habit of mine a curse. 😉
But once we finally got the house, and realized we had a major problem with the floor, he agreed that we needed to replace it.
Envision me starting to sing, “The hills are alive” at this point in time when my husband agreed with me. I mean…that doesn’t always happen.
So…we started the journey of remolding this room. I had to decide on what we should put down to replace these tiles, and that’s where BuildDirect enters this story. I thought about replacing it with their gorgeous wood tile flooring, or their pre stained/engineered flooring. But then I noticed that they carried white oak unfinished flooring in various widths that I knew would look perfect in this room.
We just had to get to that point of installation. Once the tiles were removed we saw that the sub flooring was terribly damaged and some of the sheets of wood were even rotting away. One step in some areas of the sub flooring, and you would fall straight through! I’m not even kidding.
So we took all of the sub flooring off, and went all the way down to the beams. Which we even had to replace some of them as well.
But thankfully, we made it through all of that and we are still married! 😉
Remodeling is not the easiest thing on a marriage. But thankfully, my husband and I had the same dream for this room. Because we knew this room would see the most traffic out of the entire house, and it would be the center of all our family’s memories.
I can get sentimental in a heartbeat on any given day, but for us we knew our elementary age kids would enter this room and before we knew it, we would see them leaving for their first day of high school. We think of this home as our forever home.
I’ll never forget the day the final coat of poly was put on these thick wood floors. Our kitchen had been installed and the room was empty but these floors were obviously going to take the starring role in this room. They were truly captivating.
I was pinching myself.
The other important part to note, is that all the other rooms in our house had existing hardwood floors that we had sanded down. So we knew BuildDirect offered unfinished hardwood or pre stained flooring. But since we were working with older hardwood floors in the original part of the house, the unfinished hardwood flooring from BuildDirect became a no brainer choice. We had the original hardwoods sanded, and we were able to get the unfinished white oak flooring and have it all stained to match throughout the entire house. So it was all cohesive.
I would never claim to be a designer, heck I never even took a design class. But I think its really important to have unity in a open floor concept home. So many people are tearing down walls, opening up their spaces but as much as you can use the same paint color in the open concept rooms, same surfaces if possible and definitely the same flooring. Having unity will only make the open floor plan room look bigger. You’ll achieve that magical “flow” throughout your home that we all dream about having.
We used the stain Jacobean throughout the entire house. For some reason that stain picks up all the beautiful veining and details that make a true hardwood floor so unique.
One of my favorite parts is the contrast of the flooring against the white walls, the kitchen and our fireplace. You can see below in our fireplace remodel we used the same subway tile that we did in our kitchen, and we purchased remnant pieces that were almost identical to our countertops for our hearth. Same surfaces, textiles and flooring to make it all look cohesive with our kitchen.
The wood flooring goes with everything, even with my pops of color. No matter what season it is, I know everything will flow and go together beautifully with our classic hardwood flooring.
But don’t let these “final” pics fool you! Even after we finished the floors, we had so much drama in here with our roof, pipes, the water line for the washing machine (the laundry room is on the right hand side of the above picture) the molding, lightening striking our house ~ the list goes on! It was like we would get one thing done, and the next problem would arrive. We blame most of that on the house sitting vacant for 4+ years. But thankfully and hopefully we have passed all those issues.
I had the idea to make a video of the photos and progression of this room. There’s nothing like working so hard for something, documenting the journey and having the ability to look back on it every so often. It is truly amazing how far we’ve come.
Pardon my sentimental side, once again. 😉
The video is only a minute long, and to be quite honest I still can’t believe I pulled this off and was able to make it. I may be able to use a drill, lawn mower, even a saw but anything to do with computers??? Forget it.
One of the many nice things about working with BuildDirect is that they will send anyone 5 free samples of flooring so you can see what it would look like in your own home with your own things. All you have to do is request them, and a few days later they’ll arrive at your doorstep.
Another HUGE addition they have made is if you are planning on a bathroom remodel, they now have a Design Center! All you do is put the measurements of your bathroom in, and you can add elements and things on your wish list to see what it would look like before you take the plunge and buy them. Its all free for anyone to use.
This post is sponsored by BuildDirect. All opinions and photographs are 100% my own.