Floors: Delivered, Acclimated, and Installed

We are completely floored at this point - the vintage heart of pine floors upstairs are completely installed, as are the brand new, custom cut white oak floors downstairs.  The new hardwood floors arrived a couple of weeks ago via freight delivery, so we lined up reinforcements to help with the unloading of the 100 bundles of long length floor boards, each bundle weighing about 60 pounds.  Josh, Joe, and good friend Rob (all business owners - one of Victory Golf Events and the other two, The Bookler) all arrived ready for a workout and to give Rob a hand (they work for pizza!).

The new wood was all placed in piles throughout the downstairs for the same acclimation process that was already underway with the vintage pine boards upstairs. Amazingly, they were already a close match with the moisture levels of the sub-floor, so the acclimation time was not lengthy.  This was a good thing because the board piles were everywhere and the made it very difficult to navigate through the house - I ran into the piles more than once.

First up on the install were the vintage heart of pine boards upstairs (the smaller of the two jobs since many of the original floors were still in place upstairs).

The match with the existing boards was terrific.  The installers then turned their attention to the downstairs and it looks equally amazing.

The installers will be sanding both the upstairs and downstairs floors for us at a later stage in the project and they will be sealing the upstairs with Waterlox - a product that we purchased and "played with" on boards.  I'm very excited about Waterlox - more on the advantages of Waterlox when the floors have been sealed.  We'll be tackling the staining and sealing of the downstairs floors (also with Waterlox) ourselves, also at a later stage in the process.  But, that didn't stop us from purchasing a variety of stain colors to test on leftover boards.

Although the picture doesn't really show the color and shade variations, there actually were large differences among the samples.  We are leaning towards, "Early American" second sample from the right.  For now, it's enough that we have solid floors throughout the home!