Reclaimed Heart Pine Random Width Floors–Was It Worth The Wait?

Well, to protect myself from a lawsuit, I will refrain from going into detail about the company we used to install our floors. Definitely not the smoothest part of the reno.  Actually I am not sure that there was a smooth part, but anyway….The guys that actually did the work did a very good job. It was not an easy job I am sure (THE reason we did not attempt the installation ourselves) remember, the floors would set the stage for the whole house reno. There was a lot of square footage and I doubt if we had one plumb wall in the whole house. Not to mention the uneven, cracked slab!!  We had removed all the floor tiles and carpet throughout the house.  We were going with a wider baseboard, so we removed all the old baseboards, gutted the kitchen and pretty much were left with the shell of a house!!

removing floor tiles from slab before antique heart pine installation

We chose the glue down installation over floating.  The glue is a great product, we did our research, but it is very expensive. The cost of the installation including glue and prep work added considerably to the cost of the floors. We knew that going into it, so it was not a shock, even though we ended up using TWICE the amount of glue than what was estimated……..

On day one, the owner of the company and I got into a little “disagreement” about how to install random width floors. (Even though he knew months in advance he would be installing random width).  He wanted a pattern, and I wanted them “random”. After all, they were random width for a reason. We also chose to have the direction of the floors changed in a few different places, (transitioning from one room to another) to add to the character, the look of how they used to be back in the day, when rooms would be added on to a house over the years.

Antique Reclaimed Heart Pine Wide Plank Floor

It took a crew of 4 almost a full week.

tile removed from floors before installation of antique wide plank heart pine floors

We went back and forth about whether to install the floors before the kitchen cabinets and island or the cabinets before the floors. Pine is a soft wood, that was another concern of ours. We wanted to live in our house, but spending that kind of money, we didn’t want them to have too much character right from the start, if you know what I mean!! We decided to do the floors first. We were given assurances by everyone involved that they would be very,very careful.

To make matters even worse, my husband was working out of the country and I had the good fortune of dealing with this chaos myself!!! It was a challenge. The loss of privacy was the biggest issue. It was winter, kids at school, but our two westies and I had to find a way to stay out of the way and still be present!  From first thing in the morning til 6 or 7 at night. There was no furniture left to sit on. Everything was piled together and moved around as rooms were completed. The kitchen, baths and laundry room were also gutted. The baths and laundry were getting tiled, but the wood was going through the rest of the entire house.  I could not wait to get them out of my house!!! Even though it only took 4 days for the actual installation, between the demo and the slab prep and the clean up after, it was more like a 2 week process!!!   Was it worth it?

kitchen after with reclaimed heart pine wide plank floors

Yes……..they are my favorite part of the whole renovation.

Read about how and why we decided on these floors here.