Our family/dining room is on a concrete slab so we took out the old shaggy orange carpet and scraped away the decaying, green, powdery layer underneath. I'm not sure what that layer was, since it was too thin to be useful as a cushion of any sort. It looked a lot like matcha green tea actually...not that I'd make a milkshake out of it.
We ordered a dark brown engineered hardwood from a store in Santa Clara called "Simple Floors." They had a great Fourth of July special and paid the taxes on the flooring so we got a pretty good deal on the materials. As you can see, Jai's SUV was packed to the gills.
Jai was initially going to install the flooring in the family room himself, but he discovered that the floor wasn't level so we'd have to fix that problem before wasting $1000 of material doing a terrible job. We hired a few guys to make the floor level using a really thin and runny material called "self-leveling cement". The main handyman guy was a strange, extremely heavy-set man wearing a cowboy hat and giving us a lot of attitude. He basically just ordered around a couple of guys that worked for him. I think Jai said he weighed 360 pounds!
After the floors were put in, we also got recessed lighting installed in the family room. It was a little tricky doing it in that area because the ceiling and roof had a much smaller gap between them, and there's no attic access in that part of the house. Unfortunately our nice new ceiling had to get torn up a little to get their wires through. We had to re-drywall and re-paint that area of the ceiling but thankfully it looks good now.
This is the new family room before any furniture was moved in.
This is the front living room after pulling up the old carpet. We liked how the flooring in the family room looked so much that we decided to go with that look in the rest of the house. We also found out that it's cheaper to put in a floating hardwood floor over the whole house, than it is to refinish the old floors. Since we like the contemporary dark brown flooring more anyway, and wouldn't be able to perfectly match the family room otherwise, we decided to buy another SUV-load of wood to do the other rooms.
Jai got the living room done in pretty much one full day by himself. It was a nice surprise when I got home from work. :) Now I just have to figure out what to do with that fireplace. I've been looking into acid wash to restore a bit of its original colour. It looks really dull and old-fashioned so if anyone has any advice I'd appreciate it.
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