Home Project | Flooring DIY Part 2

OMG! That’s all I can really say… oh my! Oh my! Oh my! Oh my! This was a really hard job. Everyone makes laying flooring look so easy and I spoke to a few people that said if they can do it anyone can. We did it. It looks incredible. The downstairs area is light and full of new life. It did everything we wanted and more visually. I just didn’t realize the detailing in the structure of our home. We have 90 degree corner angles and lots of 45 degree accent corners, we want our flooring to flow through 2 rooms in the downstairs alone and we are working around a ton of trim and other things we have to tailor cut around.

The last time I wrote we were ripping everything up in the media room area and prepping the floors. These past few days we actually started cutting and laying the flooring, staining and putting down the floor molding and adding quarter round. Quarter round, something the guy at Lowes told me was tacky and hideous. I’ve gotten my ear full this week of opinions I didn’t ask for and that was one of them. Hello! I’m a beginner. I’ve never messed with this type of flooring in my life. I need the comfort of messing up and being able to cover it with quarter round. And you know what, it looks good. I like it.

Now here are our new issues. The floor is stunning and everything I was hoping for but it is slick. Any flooring I’ve ever been on like ours is slick. I don’t slip at all, Jaime slipped once coming in and out of the house with sawdust packed on his shoes but that cancels out shoe grip so that’s normal. I will say it isn’t the most kid friendly flooring. If you’re roughing around and acting crazy you could easily bust your booty. There is also the mess factor. After 1 hour of Eli eating a billion crackers I quickly realized that this floor shows EVERYTHING! Toddlers practically live on crackers. I have a feeling I’m going to be sweeping a lot.

Now we’re stuck. Jaime wants the look of this floor upstairs but I can tell he feels like we’d be making a non-kid friendly death house. In the back of my mind I have to consider resell value and this is a “family home.” People will have kids. I’m considering a permanent fix so that we can lay the upstairs. I did some research and found out about applying a non-skid surface coat and I’m thinking I might buy it, test on a scrap wood to be sure it doesn’t ruin anything then apply floor wide. It is quite the conundrum. We’re kind of stuck at a standstill for now trying to decide our next move.