Lately I have gone down too many rabbit holes of stair inspo to count. We’re in our sixth house and this is the third time we have remodeled the staircase. The first two houses didn’t have stairs and the third one was new construction so that leaves us with a 50% stair remodel rate in our own homes. To me, one of the most dramatic features in a home is the staircase. Since it is usually seen from the front door, it tells the story of your home immediately after entering. My problem is, I like too many different stair designs and have such a hard time narrowing it down to just one but I know the story I want our house to tell. It’s a story that says, come on in, you’re welcome here. We take pride in our home and want it to reflect our style, design preferences and lifestyle. We want it to be relaxed and peaceful and to me, our choice of stair design reflects that. The staircase in our current house made me twitch, not relaxed and peaceful so it was one of the first things we wanted to change. Let’s get started with that inspo.
Since we are starting demo on our current stairs, I thought it would be fitting to look back at our stair remodel Tom did in our last house. We removed carpet, balusters, handrail and posts and replaced with white oak treads, white painted risers and metal railing.
We’re six months in after closing on this house and boy does home take time. We’re starting with the upstairs which includes our kids three bedrooms, a hallway, two small bonus room spaces and one bathroom that we turned into two. The first thing we did after closing was remove the carpet everywhere in the house. We decided we would rather live on plywood subfloor for a while than move everything in onto the existing carpet.
Sometimes homeowners ask the question, “should I have hardwood floors in the kitchen?” and our answer is a resounding YES, with a few caveats that we’ll go over in this blog post. But, first….why hardwood in the kitchen? Well, here are our top 5 reasons to go for it and install new hardwood floors or refinish existing hardwood in the kitchen.
Oh the Modern Memaw House (this was my client’s Memaw’s house and we modernized it just a bit, so it seemed only fitting to name this project the Modern Memaw Project). The house that started it all. The house that began our quest for achieving a light floor while hiding as much pink as we can in red oak.
Though we live in a world of natural white oak floors right now, there is something so beautiful about a rich deep brown solid site finished hardwood floor, in the right setting. Each home is different, that’s what makes it yours, and your floor stain should always compliment the design style of your home. We actually thought we were going light on these red oak floors, but after much discussion and inspo sourcing with this homeowner, we knew we wanted to do the complete opposite, dark dark dark.
Want that raw natural white oak look for your hardwood floors? Me too! If you want this look, it’s best to start out with, well, white oak of course, but we have had some luck hiding as much pink as we can in red oak by creating a custom stain mix and then applying a water-based poly.
Let’s start with the first question, is it normal for your hardwood floors to gap in the winter? The short answer? Yes. The long answer is that wood has a love/hate relationship with moisture and if you don’t nurture that relationship, your wood could give you the cold shoulder. Just like cararra marble will etch if you squirt a lemon on it, unlaquered brass will patina over time and your four year old can leave you a love note on your Italian leather chair with his fingernail, real wood will dry out and shrink in low humidity.
We love to see a house come together from the ground up but there is just something about taking what is old and making it new again. That first swipe of the sander when the wood is brought back to its original raw condition is so satisfying. The choices are endless with what happens from there. Light, dark, natural, brown, gray, black, water based, European oil? So many choices with solid 3/4” hardwood.
Sometimes we get surprised and this was one of those times. We were scheduled to remove damaged 1 inch red oak from a beautiful historic 1895 home. We had new 1 inch red oak acclimating in the home before we arrived for demo and install but as we began demo we noticed a big surprise…..another layer of hardwood, heart pine to be exact. You never know what you’re going to find in old homes. Since this home already had a mixture of heart pine and red oak throughout we, along with the homeowners, decided to refinish the existing heart pine.
I’m not sure I would really call these trends but more... classics that are still oh so good in 2021. First up is a herringbone pattern. I’ve been wanting to do this in our own home for a few houses now and we’re FINALLY planning on doing it in our newest fixer upper that we moved into in November 2020. Our plan is a herringbone pattern in the foyer and dining room and I can’t wait!
We feel water-based poly is the best option but it is completely up to our clients to decide which option is best for them. This breaks down the differences between the two.
