Choosing Floor Materials



Walnut Floor, Wide Plank Hardwood

We have used a lot of different flooring materials over the years in our remodeling and building projects, so the field is wide open with respect to the new house. Looking back on previous projects, we’ve used…

Linoleum tiles in a former kitchen,

White marble tiles in the main bath;

Granite tiles in the guest bath;

Laminate in the basement multi-purpose room;

Wide plank heart pine with a Swedish finish at the house on Whidbey Island; and

Slate in the entry on Whidbey.

All of these were relatively low maintenance and quite durable. The linoleum was virtually indestructible and had the benefit of being resilient enough that if you dropped a dish it wouldn’t necessarily break. I never even got around to sealing it as was recommended—or the marble or granite—but it never seemed to matter! The Pergo laminate was a little vulnerable to dents if you dropped something on it, but otherwise cleaned up very easily and stayed fresh and bright looking. We love the wide plank pine flooring on Whidbey; same with the slate which handles tracked-in mud and wet shoes very nicely. It never shows any wear. 



Pine Floor at our house on Whidbey Island

Softwood vs. Hardwood The fir floors in the old farmhouse on the Sunset Hill site had certainly seen a lot of wear, but still could have been refinished. In fact, that fir flooring was salvaged and may already be in someone’s house living a new life. Our pine floors on Whidbey are quite soft but we haven't had any problems. I really don’t know why there is so much concern over fir and pine being soft woods. Sure, they dent more easily than other materials or harder woods, but unless you are walking around in spike boots or stiletto heels, the damage is really minimal.

Solid Wood for Longevity
Given our success with all these materials, the question is what will we choose for the new house?

Shop(ping) Talk

Some people love to shop. Some people hate to shop. Because building a house involves a LOT of shopping, no matter which category you are in, you’d better have a strategy for getting all that shopping done.

If you love to shop, you run the risk of overwhelming yourself with the choices available. You’ll spend unbelievable amounts of time deliberating over each of the thousands of decisions that go into building and furnishing a house. Believe me, I know, because this is my shopping style!

If you hate to shop, you have other pitfalls to avoid. In your desire to get the whole thing over with as quickly as possible, you run the risk of choosing items one-by-one without thought to how they work together as a whole. Or you choose too quickly and without enough information. This leads to regrets down the road when you find a better product or a better price elsewhere.

Building a house is a marathon, not a sprint. You’ve got to have a strategy for making it across the finish line with enough energy left to enjoy this creation of yours.

An American House

When we started thinking about what physical form and stylistic expression our house would take, we were completely open--the house had only the barest outline in our minds and was virtually a blank canvas. Since we had already designed our Whidbey house in a traditional style with allusions to Danish and Swedish country houses, we were thinking about building something completely different--a contemporary house. Something in wood, but definitely modern in its spaces and circulation.

And yet, the more time we spent on our site, the more we realized that a modern house would not be the best fit--for the site, for the block, or for us.

The Cement Man Cometh

We're waaay past the point of no return now. Old house is gone, site is torn up, and dirt is everywhere. It actually looks like we're building another Hoover Dam! How is it that soil expands so much once it is dug out of the ground? The footings are done, inspected and approved, and today (6/17/10) the walls are getting poured. The foundation looks enormous and, much as we feared, seems to cover the whole site. So much for that pastoral feeling in the back yard. It is really hard to visualize the project based on how it looks right now. I can walk through the spaces and know what the rooms are, but it all seems out of scale. I sure hope this changes once the foundation is done and backfilled. We can't even see the whole site at once right now because of the pyramids of soil everywhere.

My current preoccupation is figuring out whether to vent the crawl space or not. Who knew that crawl spaces were so complex and fascinating? (sic)