Bamboo floors...

Mr. Paisley has been busy at the Cottage. ~~In 1997~~ A gazillion years ago I had some lovely berber carpet put in the family room, master and guest bedrooms here at the cottage. It was old. It was tired. Mr. Paisley burned a hole in it with a light bulb. Luckily, on a day that I was not going in to work until the afternoon...the smell woke me up. He had taken the light fixture off one of the iguana cages and set it on the floor, then didn't put it back...it's on a timer. A 100 watt bulb will melt nylon fiber carpet down to the cement sub floor in nothing flat. Just sayin'...

At any rate, I love my wood floors at the cabin - even though they are in dire need of refinishing. I wanted wood. He wanted bamboo. I wanted darker, but not too dark. He bought natural. Whatever.

Ambient Bamboo had a stellar deal on Strand Woven Natural Click Lock flooring. He ordered it. I lived with 19 boxes of flooring stacked in my living room for weeks. It came the day before we went on vacation for a week. Because we have a concrete sub floor and it was going in a room where we will be moving a wall and adding another room off it, we had to use a floating floor. This way we can pull it up without damaging it and mix in the new flooring that may or may not be an exact match when that time comes.

Ambient will send free samples. We got the natural and the carbonized. I wanted the carbonized. DH bought natural. I covered it with giant rugs...but that's another post.

We cut the carpet and padding into 2' wide strips, rolled it up, tied it and put it out for the garbage collection. The amount of dirt UNDER the carpet...OMG. The carpet removal went quickly. Then Mr. P decided he wasn't really in the mood to work on the floors. It didn't help that I pointed out the large bright green stickers on the boxes of flooring that said "if you live in FL you need to open the side and both ends of the box to let the flooring acclimate for 72 hours before installation". It had been sitting in the living room for 3 weeks. Sealed up. He said a lot of nasty things.

That's moldy looking (but not) concrete that once upon a time had sticky back vinyl tiles on it...under the nasty green carpet that was there when I bought the house.

The foil looking rolls of underlayment went down and several trips to the big box hardware store were made for seam tape. Special red seam tape. The flooring itself went down quick - not a ton of cutting.

Just the pieces for the end of the room, the ones that fit around door jambs and the ones along one wall.

The biggest pain was that we live in a very small house with no room to just empty out 2 rooms to do it all at once. In fact we worked around the sectional sofa. We took it apart and put it on one side of the room, did the floor, moved it on top of the new floor, did the rest of the room....

the bedroom was even more interesting. There was at least a 2 week break between finishing the family room and moving on to the bedroom. I had dirty concrete flooring in my bedroom that long. Yuck.

The flooring went down just as quickly in there, a little more cutting though - turns out that room is FAR from square...no such thing as quality construction these days. Then I lived without the transition pieces in the doorways for weeks. I'm not really sure what the hold up on that was - other than Mr. Paisley just didn't do it. Typical of course...he does most of his projects to about 95%. He eventually finished them, only because we were having a party and I said no way. The closet isn't done in the bedroom. Care to place any bets on how long that will sit unfinished?