Old floors are not always good floors.

So tragedy struck last week. We had floor re-finishers in to pull up the carpet in the house and refinish the floors. Upon pulling up the carpets it was discovered that the oak floors downstairs were shot. They are rotted in the living room and have pet stains and they are also rotted back by the kitchen. The floor people then went on to say that they were worried about the structural stability of the floor which sent me spiraling into a panic thinking that we could all fall through the floor at any moment.

After a few days I have calmed down and now realized that we had a very good home inspector who found some small cracks in two floor joists but nothing majorly structural wrong with the floor and we have all been walking, jumping etc. on these floors for over a month now and nothing has happened. The floors are structurally fine.

Now on the cosmetic side, the floors are crap. We had someone from Empire Today out to price the job and they quoted us $27,000 for about 500 sq feet. That was full price and of course he had a “deal” which got it down to a little under half that but the point is that’s way too much. Also this was the price to have engineered hardwood (1/8″ of hardwood on plywood) laid over the existing hardwood. It would have been an additional $1700 to rip up the old floor. We left that meeting depressed thinking that we could never afford to put hardwood down and would have to carpet but we quickly found out that they are way over priced. Smaller independent contractors charge way less, about a third of Empire’s “deal” price and probably do a better job.

We have a company coming out on Wed. to measure and give us an estimate. They can install the floors on the 21st 22nd and 23rd which means we could move in the day before Thanksgiving if the movers are available!!!! That would rock. We probably still won’t host Thanksgiving like we planned but at least we’d be in our house.