Hey gang! Today begins The Story of My New Floor! I tried to think of a catchier title, but that’s the best I got.
As you may recall, we built our house new less than a year ago. So what the heck, why are we getting new floors so soon? I’ll tell you why. Because we built our home using a building company. That’s just how you do it in Phoenix unless you have a bazzillion dollars and/or acres of property handed down from your ancestors.
Building companies offer you “choices.” These choices include A) cheapity cheap crappy cheap stuff, also known as ‘builder grade’ or B) Stuff of a slightly higher quality, but priced as though it were made of diamonds and hand delivered by Beyonce via yacht.
So we could either go through the builder and put in the nice wood floors we actually wanted and add oh … $35,000 to our mortgage; OR we could settle for flooring we didn’t want and replace it on our own later (for way, WAY less money. That number up there is not an exaggeration). I tried and tried for the best and least wasteful option of all: to get them to put in NO flooring and let us do it ourselves, but that was a no-go. DUMB.
Anyway, we obviously chose the builder grade flooring. And here it is:
Not terrible. But not what we wanted, and not anything that could withstand four kids. The carpet was the cheapest of the cheap. It was very thin and already showing a lot of wear and tear even though I was vigilant about not wearing shoes in the house, no food on the carpet, etc.
This door leads to the garage, so we use it constantly as we come and go, and the carpet here was a grunge magnet.
The tile was the most basic 12×12 gray tile in existence. I think my dentist’s office has the same tile.
The carpet that met the kitchen tile was also increasing in grossness daily.
So, before we even moved in, the plan was to eventually rip this out and replace the entire downstairs with wood flooring. Someday.
And then the heavens opened and Lumber Liquidators offered to work with me on this project. Talk about a no brainer. I grew up in a family of builders; my dad is a contractor and my brother owns a home restoration business, and Lumber Liquidators has been their flooring company choice to work with many times.
So the time had come. We were finally going to say adios to our carpet and tile! Demo commenced:
Yikes.
Hold me.
Tearing up carpet was bad, but ripping out tile? THE WORST.
The rubble. The DUST. It’s endless.
WHAT HAVE I DONE??? I am thinking.
This part of the process feels like it will never end.
We rented a tool that was meant for tearing up tile, a big jack-hammery thing, and when we went to return it a couple days later, the lady at the desk said “Someone made a mistake. This isn’t the right tool for tearing up tile.” Awesome. So, apparently there is a better tool out there than whatever the heck we used. I wish I could tell you what it is.
The next few weeks were spent sweeping and dusting and sweeping again and dusting some more, while we waited for our installation date to draw near.
And that’s all for now! Sorry to leave you hanging! Especially on such a bummer of a photo. Take a good long look at it and think about how you didn’t have to be the one to haul away those piles of tile shards, and you’ll feel better.
I will be sharing more soon!
