Floors and doors and more(s)

Per the post title, this update has 3 parts: hardwood floors are in (!), interior doors are picked and being delivered, and some other fun updates.

Floors

Flooring started ~2 weeks ago! Here’s what we saw when we visited back in June:

We knew we wanted to do hardwood floors, but it turns out there are LOTS of sizes and species of wood floor. After doing some research (that is, going to Home Depot and looking at floors), we decided to go with white oak, ~3-4 inch wide. I was originally thinking we do the classic 2-1/4″ red oak you see throughout Chicago, but we wanted to avoid reddish undertones since (we think) we’re going to keep the wood pretty light/natural in color.

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We also decided to do the front formal living room floor in a herringbone pattern. I like how it turned out, though after seeing it I would have preferred a slightly longer board.

Doors

We picked two interior door styles: a 5-panel door for the entryways into rooms, and a 3-panel door for the closets. They’re all solid wood core doors (not hollow), so they’re pretty beefy. The plan is to paint the 5-panel doors black, and leave the closet doors white. I’ll note that we looked at TONS of door styles, including spending hours trying to find someone who sells the door featured in this blog post, but after getting quotes, we found we were very happy with the price point of these doors – it turns out individual doors can get SUPER expensive.

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More(s)

The skylights are in and with the drywall finished, they look Tony-the-Tiger-greeeeeeat! The middle of both the first and second floors have great natural light pouring in. Two of the skylights are operable via a solar-powered motor – how cool is that?!?

The back of the house is looking good – the black cladding has been added, and it’s looking much better. We had to nudge the French doors in the kitchen over to make room for the cabinets, so it’s more asymmetric than we planned for, but c’est la vie. 🙂

What’s next?

All the fun stuff seems to be happening at once: tiling is starting, kitchen cabinets started going in this week, and trim is about to start next week.