I’m so excited to show you our floors!!! They are very special to me. During our six months of househunting we toured some houses that had heart pine floors. I was smitten. After moving into our “last resort” house with dingy, worn out berber carpet and white dated floor tiles, read about that here I began to fantasize about replacing them one day with heart pine floors. As I began my Houzz ideabooks and Pinterest boards, my imagination soared! Now I not only wanted heart pine floors, but I wanted antique (reclaimed) heart pine floors in variable widths. They would be the foundation of the entire redo. Perfect for a beach house (it really is not important that our house is not on the beach) my vision was coming into focus!
Thankfully, my darling husband has pretty much the same vision. A miracle in itself, as he never seemed particularly interested in moving to the beach, let alone living in a beach house.
Well, maybe I should clarify the importance of the flooring decision. Our house is on a slab, meaning it’s built on a slab of concrete, there is no crawl space. And……because our house wasn’t icky enough to begin with, I decided to take up the tile in the kitchen, breakfast room and back hall almost immediately after getting the keys in our hot little hands. Not a smart decision. Of course by the time I learned the cost of my beloved reclaimed heart pine floors, it was too late, the tile was gone and the only thing left was our very jacked up concrete slab. It was full of cracks and uneven leftover tile glue and lots of concrete dust…it was just yuck. We worried and researched and worried some more. We were finally convinced that the cracks were not going to be a problem. We found the floors we wanted that could go right on the slab. The only problem…….they were very costly. Hence the few years that we lived on those dirty, disgusting, bare concrete floors.
These particular floors were the single most costly thing that we would do to our entire house. We tried on more than one occasion to convince ourselves that something else would work, and give us the result we were after. It never worked out. We tried. We really, really tried! We may have never pulled the trigger on the floors if it hadn’t been for a phone call from Authentic Pine Floors. Darline was calling to tell us there was going to be another price increase! Finally, after years of waiting and saving, we were ready to do the floors. Nothing else would do. We made a final pledge to each other, we were going to go down to Georgia to look at the floors in person. After all, we couldn’t make a decision of this magnitude without seeing more than a few sample pieces, right? If we weren’t just blown away, we would go with a less expensive choice for floors. Deal! We even shook on it. Are they gorgeous or what? The baby is pretty darn gorgeous too!!! I’ll tell you all about the installation in my next post!