First, let me tell you a little about me.
I have had the pleasure of working for Nufloors for the last number of years. However, I work in the administration side of the business and not in the retail stores. I know a little about all the wonderful flooring options out there, but quite honestly, not enough to have the confidence in my decision for new flooring without some help. After all, I’m going to have to live with this new flooring choice for a long time. I wanted to be sure of my decision and so I approached choosing my flooring from the perspective of being a customer of Nufloors.
This is my story of my flooring renovation, which turned into a flooring/kitchen renovation!
For years I have wanted to install hardwood floors on the main floor of our home. I had a few obstacles in my way, the biggest one being removing two layers or ceramic tile from 50% of the floor space. Other obstacles, what do I do with all our furniture? How long will it take to complete? What type of hardwood should I choose? What should I be thinking about when I choose my new floor? We had a mis-match of flooring types on our main floor level – laminate, tile, and carpet.
The day finally arrived. We were ready to make the move and get this flooring renovation done. We always knew that it wouldn’t make sense to re-do the flooring unless we renovated the kitchen at the same time. It was long overdue. We lined up our kitchen contractor and we knew exactly what we wanted for our new kitchen (thank you Houzz – couldn’t have done it without you). We got our order into the kitchen supply company and knew we had 7 weeks to get our old flooring out and the new flooring in.
This is where we really experienced first hand the importance of working with good flooring people who know what they are doing. Choosing new flooring, especially hardwood, is not as easy as you think. There are a lot of factors that go into a successful installation and years of enjoyment of a beautiful floor.
After you visit the showroom, you will have an estimator visit your home to measure your rooms and to check the sub-floor and in our case, the crawlspace, for moisture. Moisture is hardwood’s biggest enemy. Gerry, our estimator, brought some issues to our attention and made recommendations for minor work we needed to do in the crawlspace to help with the moisture issues. This was an easy fix and had Gerry not inspected our crawlspace, we likely would have had cupping and crowning issues with our hardwood floor. Gerry also noted our floor in the kitchen dipped a little and would have to be leveled. Hardwood needs a completely level sub-floor otherwise there will be issues with the floor’s performance in the months/years ahead.
Next we needed to choose a hardwood floor.
This is where the salesperson is so helpful and becomes your trusted advisor. We did a lot of research on the web and had an idea in mind of what we wanted. A medium dark wood, smooth, matte finish solid hardwood. Our salesperson, Athena, explained to us that, as we have a beloved member of our family, Indie, our three year old golden doodle, having a dog of that size on a smooth finish floor could be a problem as scratches (from her nails) will show and we will be disappointed.
Athena recommended a floor that would be perfect for our home, and recommended TORLYS SUPER SOLID 5 engineered hardwood – this gorgeous hand scraped hardwood is finished with highest quality top coat for remarkable durability and performance. Flooring chosen: check, flooring ordered: check. Now to get the old floor out. Oh no… that’s not going to be fun…
The job of removing the old flooring was the toughest part of our reno. We hired our own contractor for this job, but Nufloors would have helped us with this if needed. We actually did some of the work ourselves and found it to be a good stress reliever! We needed to remove old glued down laminate, which came up fairly easily. Old carpet, which was easy to pull up. But the problem was the dreaded 2 layers of ceramic tile. The top layer was 12 x 12 porcelain tile – which popped up quite easily. It was what was underneath that was the problem. 8 x 8 Terra Cotta tiles which had to be chipped off in itty bitty pieces. Our contractor ended up taking a sledge hammer to the floor to chip the tile apart. For a day we had a red layer of dust over top of our house – and dust does go everywhere in your home. Thank goodnesss we used plastic sheets to tape off the 2nd level of our house. It really helped.
Success! – tile removed! But, the sub-floor was destroyed with all the sledge hammering. So, a new sub-floor was installed – we installed a new sub-floor in the family room, living room, kitchen and hallway.
As we were installing hardwood everywhere (except the laundry/guest bathroom) we needed to ensure the floor was completely level. This is why we needed the professional installation services of Nufloors. Anthony, our installer, visited our home prior to the installation date to ensure the floor was level and everything was ready for the installation.
The flooring had to be installed first before the kitchen installation. We cleared all of our furniture out using Upak and were ready for the install. We had about 1,000 sf of hardwood to be installed and it took our installers 2 days to complete. This included leveling a part of our floor in our kitchen. Two days later, our gorgeous new hardwood flooring was installed. What a thrill. It looked beautiful!
A week later, our kitchen installation was completed. Our furniture was delivered and set back into our home and we were finally done. During the renovation we painted, added new moldings, removed the old pop-corn ceilings and added new pot lighting.
My message on all this is buying and installing new flooring is a complicated process and knowing that experts like Gerry, Athena and Anthony have your back and can walk you through the process with a beautiful result like we experienced, is worth it.
Choose your flooring retailer wisely – it will pay off in the end and you will love your new floors!
Specials thanks to everyone at Nufloors Langley, especially Athena, Gerry and Anthony!
Couldn’t have done it without you!
