Hand-Scraped Wood Floors, 5 Years Later

Reading today about another blogger's dilemma over replacing her old wood floors (here) reminded me of when we were in the same situation back in November 2012. 

On New Year's Eve Day 2010, we bought a brand new house that wasn't quite finished. The builder had decided not to put the wood floors in that he had planned, but dropped the price by $30,000 That's when we said sold!

We lived with ugly, half-assed stained cement floors for almost 2 years before we found exactly the wood floors we wanted. Here's what the ugly concrete floors looked like...

Our wood floors are hand-scraped and stained a medium dark color,  a sort of chestnut, but has a lot of variation in it. It took 5 days for 4 guys to complete the job from start to finish. 

The bare wood sat in our house for a few days to acclimate to the house conditions. This stack was in our breakfast room.

The bare wood was laid down in the great room (where I'm standing taking the photo), dining room (the room to the right), office nook (the hallway to the left leads down to it), entryway and other hallways before being hand-finished...

The wood guys did a sample for us. They hand-scraped the wood in two variations. The left is lightly scraped, the right is scraped a lot more. We chose the right, highly scraped one. The stain, on both samples, is exactly the same...

Next the hand-scraping started and went on and on...

The wood guys covered all the granite and vacuumed a lot to keep any dust down. We had already put travertine tiles in the kitchen, bathrooms, and laundry room. 

Sorry for the awful pictures. I took these back in 2012 with a point and shoot camera and all the lights were blaring to provide light for the work going on.

Stain went on in several different layers--stain, sand, stain, sand. This was probably taken about halfway through the staining as the finished stain is a lot darker.

This picture shows off the hand-scraping, but the color is a lot redder looking than it actually is...

Here's a more accurate depiction of the floor colors. I love the variation of the wood and stain...

We absolutely love the rough hand-scraping and would do it all over again! The only thing we would change is that we would have continued the wood floors into the master bedroom instead of putting carpeting in there.

In fact, we plan to replace the bedroom carpet with the same wood flooring as soon as that carpeting wears out. 

The wood floors were really reasonably priced. The price difference between putting in the hand-scraped wood floors in the master bedroom, or the high-quality rug padding and carpeting we did put in, was only about $400. We should have gone for the wood in the bedroom!

We took our sweet time moving all our furniture back into the house. We really loved the expansive look of the house without the furniture hiding our new floors...

My biggest concern was cleaning wood floors. I had never had wood floors and knew that carpeting was easy...just vacuum it. But how do you clean wood floors? 

Well, after almost 5 years of wood floors, I can tell you we just vacuum them! We use the vacuum hose to go into the corners and along the baseboards. If something spills, we wipe it up. Unlike the carpets, spills don't stain our wood floors. 

If you're considering replacing your floors with wood in the future, I hope this post helps with your dilemma.

Thanks for dropping by!

Joining the party here:
Foodie Friday And Everything Else at Rattlebridge Farm
Vintage Charm Party at My Thrift Store Addiction

Friday Favorites at Under A Texas Sky