When it comes to this house, sometimes I feel like a super successful do-it-yourselfer and other times a complete failure. The flooring, the literal foundation for every room, falls into the failure category. But we are working on rectifying the situation, only 3.75 years into living here! Approximately half the house has had most of its wood floors installed for a least the last year or two, but lingering rows remained unfinished and abandoned under furniture. Preventing us from baseboards. Preventing us from any “finished” look anywhere in the house.

I’m so ready to move on with my life so I’ve pushed this project to priority status, though installing wonky boards is the last thing my husband wants to do in his free time. I’ve talked previously about our love/hate relationship with the hardwood floors we chose. They are so pretty, but have been THE WORST to install. Not like I’m doing any of the hard stuff. My husband has taken on that burden completely upon his shoulders (and knees, and wrists, and hands, and back…). But the installation has been so hard and so frustrating that the flooring is the #1 project that we avoid and ignore in our house. Which is unfortunate, because it’s not as is the flooring in your entire house can be hidden behind a closed door. I see it daily. It became that thing we were semi-blind to and forget how bad it actually is…or how much better it could be if we just put in a few days of work. This past weekend was dedicated to tying up some lose flooring ends and the few miserable days of work have paid dividends! Among other things, the flooring in the entry and adjacent coat closet is finally finished! This part of our house was at one point an open hole to the earth below – we had to remove and replace subfloor because it so not level that floors couldn’t even be installed upon it. Only a few unfinished rows of floors remained, but it was hours of work that included refinishing the exterior wood threshold, custom fitting a new gasketed threshold under the door, and impossibly shimmying the puzzle pieces of the last row into place. You can’t see this, but the door even got some new hinges to help it hang a little better on our old crooked and shifting house (!). My husband does really great work and I’m so thankful for all the different kinds of hard works he puts in for our family.
For so long the first steps into our house were unfinished ones, a taste of what was to come. This seems to signify a great shift in our household! The entry is now leaving me with quite the good impression. I know why we pushed this project off for so long, but at the same time, why did we wait so long to do this??? We also checked off the den flooring, kitchen flooring, and dining room flooring this weekend, which means those rooms are now ready for baseboards. Which has brought us to another exciting but frustrating stop on our journey: picking out the baseboards! I’ve narrowed it down to something void of ornamentation, but I can’t land on a height. Really tall? 60’s short? In between? What is the answer internet? We could go with a super simple cove that is probably most like the original baseboards of the house, but feels compared to taller simple squared off options. NO MORE DECISIONS.