Floor & Decor – Making it Lovely

Repairing and Replacing the Closet Floor

Our bedroom floor had some give to it, right by the door to the closet. The floor in the closet was soft too and it had been carpeted, presumably because it was a cheap and easy fix. We’re about to address a similar problem in the hallway, and we figured we ought to fix these spots at the same time.

We got the carpet out of there, and as suspected, the floor underneath was in bad shape. You can tell that someone had tried to do some temporary repairs (basically “add all the nails you can find!”). The wood floor is the same stuff that was in the hallway, probably added in the forties. Super thin, old, and brittle. Underneath? A subfloor that had been patched. With beadboard. And under the beadboard (yikes), the floor joists had been notched out to run plumbing for the very heavy cast iron radiator. No wonder the floor hadn’t held up there!

We saved the best pieces of flooring from the closet so that we could fix the portion in the bedroom at the same time. The floor in there runs through to the next room without a threshold, and to replace all of that right now isn’t something that we’re interested in doing. It isn’t in perfect shape, but the worst of it was that spot by the closet, and if we could patch it, that seemed like the best option.

I’m happy to lay new flooring (we’ve done it before), but fixing something that had already been fixed improperly? I was afraid I’d end up doing the same thing, which would lead to problems either immediately or down the line. Either way: not good. So after the wood planks were pried up, we had a pro remove the damaged sections of subfloor. The patched portion came up pretty easily with a crowbar and the back of a hammer, and he cut away a few other areas as well. Some of the floor joists were sistered and sturdy plywood was cut to fit.

Once the bedroom patch was done and the subfloor in the closet had been fixed, we had a sturdy surface that was ready for the new hardwood flooring.

A strong subfloor instead of a flimsy 75-year-old beadboard patch! How novel.

We shopped at Floor & Decor for wood to replace the old stuff in the remodeled portion of our hallway last year and had a great experience with them, so I was happy that they were looking to partner again.

They have big samples on display (this is just one small section of their wood flooring) and I really like their gray-based finishes, but I chose the same style as before: prefinished Gunstock solid oak hardwood flooring in 2-1/4″ wide planks, 3/4″ thick. It’s similar in color and width to what we have throughout the rest of the house, and since it’s solid oak, we could sand and refinish it if we ever wanted to. I also picked up the same underlayment again. It muffles noise, serves as a vapor barrier, and provides a little cushion.

Installation was pretty straightforward and took us three days (around four or five hours per day). Floor & Decor holds free classes on Saturdays teaching people about wood and laminate floors, how to install backsplashes, and all about working with tile and stone. They also have videos on their site with information on installation and choosing the right products. When you head out there, they have tons of options in stock and at really good prices, so you can choose your materials and bring everything you need home with you that day. Hooray for instant gratification! Just remember that if you’re putting in hardwood flooring like us, you need to give yourself a few days’ lead time to let the product sit and acclimate to your house.

The new flooring (on the right) makes the old floor (left) look pretty bad. You don’t realize how crummy something is until you get the nice, new stuff right up next to it! I mean, it’s a fine problem to have (boohoo, our new floor is too nice).

The closet floor needed to be replaced for practical reasons, but I’ve gotta say, it’s way more satisfying that some of the other work we’ve been doing to the house lately. Actual visual changes! Not just a vague “it’s safer” feeling, but something we can actually see! Woohoo.

The new floor makes me want to freshen up the rest of the closet now, too. It was a cool space before with it’s curved wall and window, and the little sink nook, but now it has the potential to be something pretty special.

November 30, 2015

Six Designs Inspired by Stone

I’ve been working with Floor & Decor on a few posts for the blog around the three main things they carry: wood, tile, and stone. I’ve already shared my experience with wood (and bamboo), and six designs inspired by ceramic and porcelain tiles. Today, I’m sharing another six designs, but this time inspired by stone. I went to my local Floor & Decor and picked up a whole bunch of my favorites, then came home and played around with paint swatches, wallpaper samples, and other elements to create different designs.

Travertine Tile

A lot of people, myself included, hear “travertine” and think “nineties.” It was used everywhere it seems, and it can read as boring (or worse, dated). It has a lovely, earthy quality to it though, and when paired with sharp contrast and/or vivid color, it serves as an organic element to ground a room.

Basketweave Marble Tile

Classic. More formal than subway and hexagon tile, but versatile in the same way. It would look stunning in a room with white walls and white painted woodwork, letting the tile be the star, but it could easily take a supporting role too.

Slate and Marble Mix

These two almost match, but because they’re different materials, they play off of each other and are more interesting. A change in scale helps too. I would use slate for the floor and line the walls of a glass-enclosed shower with the mosaic marble, then bring in a muted color for the walls. The silver beetle here is representing silver finishes, but go ahead and add a random bug object too. Why not?

Geometric Marble Mosaic Tile

Cute, cute, cute. The geometry of the tile with all of its squares and triangles is cut by the looser style of the floral wallpaper. Paint the ceiling pale pink. Bring in a vintage dresser and cut the top for a sink, freshening the whole thing up with a glossy coat of paint. Boom — the most adorable bathroom.

Gray Marble Chevron/Herringbone Tile

They’re calling this “chevron” but it’s really herringbone. Either way, it’s a classic pattern that went through a huge resurgence in popularity over the last, what, five to seven years? Done in a single color (of marble, in this case), it resists being pegged as trendy. Play off of that with a mix of trendy-right-now blue and white chinoiserie and more simply patterned fabrics. Grayish blue on the walls pulls the whole look together.

Graphic Basketweave Marble Tile

You can’t quite make it out from the sample of the wallpaper here, but those are surveillance cameras hidden among the flowers and butterflies. Brilliant, right? The perfect kind of quirk to bring to a bathroom with pink fixtures. Update the walls, bring in a little dark paint on a wooden mirror, use a mosaic on the floor that’s a nod to the designs of the fifties (but much more chic), and leave the pastel tub, toilet, and sink.

Do you find yourself drawn more to natural materials like stone, or do you like the options that ceramic and porcelain tiles make possible? I’m more often drawn to the latter category, but then aren’t we all smitten with marble?

October 29, 2015

Six Designs Inspired by Tile

I’m working with Floor & Decor on a few posts for the blog around the three main things they carry: wood, tile, and stone. I’ve already shared my experience with wood (and bamboo), and for the other two posts, I thought it would be fun to put together a bunch of designs inspired by tile and stone. I went to my local Floor & Decor and picked up a whole bunch of my favorites, then came home and played around with paint swatches, wallpaper samples, and other design elements to create different designs.

Today I’m sharing looks inspired by ceramic and porcelain tiles, and in a future post, I’ll do the same for marble, slate, and travertine tiles.

And yes, I totally want to make all of these happen in real life now.

Subway and Hexagon Tile

Pick a color. Any color! Subway and hex tile are classics that go pretty much anywhere with pretty much everything, and they’re cheap to boot. We had both of these in our first house.

Penny Rounds

I imagine this in a cheery kitchen with vintage (or vintage-inspired) green appliances. A tulip table and colorful shaker chairs form a little breakfast nook, and retro/vintage accessories (bread bin, kitchen scale) in shades of green and blue dot the space.

White Arabesque Tile

The tile is a classic decorative shape and it can take star billing if you keep everything else simple. If you want to have a little more fun with your decorating, it pairs up nicely with figurative wallpaper — especially when it’s hot pink. I’d love to see the two in a powder room with wood floors, brass fixtures, and a sink dropped into an old piece of furniture that’s been painted in a rich ochre. A vintage wooden stool with turned legs would make a fine stand for a plant or a stack of fresh towels.

Gray Glass and Striated Tile

Here we’ve got that same tile shape again, but in a very different design. This time it’s sleek in glass, and I’d pair it with long horizontal glass tile in a shower enclosure. Tile with some depth to it (thanks to inkjet printing!) would counteract all of the glossy surfaces elsewhere, and paint or accessories in cool greenish blue shades would finish off the room.

Spanish Red Tile

If you have inherited a house with this tile, you likely either love and embrace it or curse it and wish it gone. It goes rustic with warm, worn woods and creamy white tones, or you can take it boho with plants everywhere, natural textures and a smattering of jewel tones and gold embroidery. And if your taste runs like mine toward pink and feminine? Yep, that’ll work too. Peachy pinks like the paint and wallpaper below look fantastic with the earthy red of the tile.

Wood-Look Tile

I’m not a huge fan of faux-wood tile in large expanses because the grout lines look a little off (wood does not and should not have grout), but they can be great in basements and bathrooms. Our bathrooms have hardwood flooring, and they are not a good mix with kids that sometimes (often) splash water around and don’t clean up after themselves, leaving you to find puddles hours later. Not that we would know anything about that. *ahem*

Anyway! I think the key to pulling off wood tile is to let the wood be in the background by pulling attention toward other design elements (either texture or pattern). Pair one of these plank styles with one of the wallpaper designs — your choice.

Of the designs above, do you have a favorite? How about any that you would do completely differently (a least favorite)?

August 31, 2015

My Dream Wood Floor

Here’s a quick ‘how long have you been reading this blog’ check. Remember when Brandon and I installed bamboo flooring in a couple of rooms in our first house?

We were so house-proud. Dark bamboo was especially good against pale pink walls!

It looked equally at home with charcoal gray, too. There are a bunch of options out there for dark bamboo, depending on whether you like it to be almost black, a little warmer with more brown, textured, or smooth. This espresso stain looks the closest to the finish we used all those years ago. Floor & Decor has a bunch of videos on their site, including one all about bamboo flooring.

That home was old (built in 1910), but the second floor was a later addition and we felt like we could deviate a bit from the style of the house. The dark floors were dramatic, and they provided the contrast I tend to love in design. A word of warning though — dark floors, be they wood, bamboo, carpet, or tile, need more frequent cleaning because every speck of dirt, dust, or pet hair shows. Still, they look good enough that I would take the tradeoff.

We’ve put in new flooring in the Victorian too. I was very pregnant when we remodeled the second floor, so I wasn’t about to do the installation myself. We did half of the hallway and got to a stopping point, with the intention of taking a break, having a baby, getting the house rewired, and then continuing on. The electrical work is about 80% done, according to the electricians, but the last 20% is going to see us ripping up a lot of the house to access everything. Poor house. But then we can finish the hallway (and a few other projects that the rewiring had put on hold)!

The solid hardwood I chose for the hall is a skinny Gunstock Oak. I tried to match up our existing wood floor as closely as possible, in color and width. I do sometimes miss the drama of the dark floors in our old house, but a medium tone is beautiful too.

In a different house though? I would kill for a chance to install one of these gray wood finishes. I’ve seen a few of these at the store, and I think this one is my favorite. Installed in a chevron or herringbone pattern? It would be so good.

You know, like in Jacques Dirand’s Paris flat.

Sigh. Total dream floor. Does it really fit in a Chicago Victorian? DON’T CARE. But it doesn’t make sense to randomly add it to a hallway, and so we didn’t. Now if we were ever to replace the floor in the main rooms? It would be a serious contender.

July 23, 2015

Choosing Our Hardwood Flooring for the Hallway

When Brandon and I bought our Victorian, we knew that the flooring in the hallway on the second floor would need to be addressed eventually. There are a couple of soft spots with noticeable give, and our home inspector estimated that we could probably go five-or-so years before replacement/repair would be necessary. The floor hasn’t gotten any worse in our year of living here, but since we were opening up the back of the hallway and putting in new flooring, we thought we may as well choose new flooring for the entire hall now.

Our contractor’s schedule is usually booked up pretty far in advance, but he was able to move our remodeling project up so that construction on the hallway and nursery could be completed before baby number three arrives. Putting in the new flooring throughout the entire hall isn’t as pressing as the rest of the project was though, so with the major work already done, we’ll have our guy back out in a few months to finish up once his schedule has been cleared. I don’t expect our flooring choice to be discontinued anytime in the immediate future, but just in case, we’re going to buy and store the rest of the wood needed to complete the hallway so that everything will match. There is a significant difference in the thickness between the new and old wood, but we’ll keep a runner over that transition for now so that nobody trips or stubs their toe.

Selecting the new flooring material was up to us, so that we could choose the type, style, and finish ourselves. I asked if he had a recommendation for where to look, and he said that he had been referring his customers to a relative newcomer, Floor & Decor. I wasn’t familiar with them before that day, but coincidentally, I had received an email that same morning about their fourth Chicagoland store set to open in Skokie on the 12th. They were interested in working together, and after visiting (and liking) the Lombard location per my contractor’s recommendation, the timing worked out perfectly to partner on our hallway project.

Brandon and I chose a prefinished wood floor for ease of installation, and we also picked up an underlayment to muffle sound. I was a little worried that the micro-beveled edges on the wood planks would bother me since I like the smooth mirror-like finish of flooring that has been finished in place, but the floor looks great. I didn’t want a jarring change down the hallway, so I chose a color and wood that was similar to what we already had throughout the house: Gunstock Oak. I also went with the skinny 2-1/4″ planks to match the original floor as closely as possible. The hardest choice to make was whether we wanted engineered or solid hardwood. Engineered wood floors cost less, and there are some great quality options out there, but the longevity of solid wood won us over. Hallways are high-traffic areas and solid wood can be refinished multiple times over the years if need be, and it felt like a more appropriate choice for the house.

The old flooring still needs to be replaced in the original part of the hallway of course, but it looks fantastic already. So exciting to see the hall being returned to its original state and configuration!

Floor & Decor carries ceramic, stone, tile, wood, and laminate flooring, so be sure to check them out if you’re in the market. They offer free design consultations, and their showrooms are large enough that they often have the materials and tools you need in-stock and ready to take home. Floor & Decor already operates 44 stores across the country, and their new Skokie store will have events for the whole family this Friday and Saturday during their grand opening!

September 9, 2014

Tag: Floor & Decor