Hardwood Landings

If we had our way, and money were no object, our house would not have an ounce of carpet – it would all be hardwood and area rugs. Having pets, this seems like the much more sanitary version of flooring and we also feel it is a lot easier to keep up with from a cleaning perspective. Carpet seriously just grosses me out.

A few weeks back, we were forced to make the decision to add hardwood to the landings on our stairs. And when I say forced, we’ll just say the cats made the decision for us. We initially thought about doing hardwood on all the stairs as well {with white risers} but that was entirely more money than we were willing to spend at this point.

At one point, someone I work with suggested just doing hardwood on the landings. It sounded a little off to me, but my handy husband found some photos and I was convinced it would work. So at that point, we visited a few stores like Lowe’s, Home Depot and Nebraska Furniture Mart and found the best match/most economic solution at NFM. We placed the order and planned to do all the installation ourselves since we were just dealing with rectangular areas.

However, the same person at work knew a floor guy and she was sure he would install them on the cheap and she knew he did a great job {he had installed all of her stairs}. We gave him a call and he quoted a price that did not make it even remotely worth it for us to try on our own. The best part? He and a friend showed up last night and finished BOTH landings in three and a half hours! Pretty sure that saved two full weekends of our lives.

No more talk. I present our newly hardwood-ed landings {I didn’t really take any before shots}. I still have to paint the quarter round and touch up the drywall paint in a few areas that the carpet previously covered. And for those detail-oriented folks, the new flooring is Paramount Flooring’s 5″ wide, 3/4″ Mountain Heritage Birch in the Crested Butte color (H0651). I actually love it more than our existing floors {which we believe is a similarly stained oak} and it is extremely affordable – likely even more so than most carpet.

{here you can see a comparison of the old and new}

{the never before seen staircase to the basement}