Outside we are now into the second week of the siding job while the drywall crew finished up on the inside of our Modern South Park Bungalow. I ended up going with a 90% smooth, hand-troweled texture on the entire house and garage. It took 165 sheets of drywall, a case of tape and 30 boxes of mud for the entire job on this 1850 s.f. house. My guys do an incredible flawless job so I’m happy once again.
Now that the drywall is done, we are going straight into laying the hardwood floors this week. These are the real deal, 2 1/4″ x 3/4″ Red Oak unfinished hardwood.
Once the house is all done, one of the last things we’ll do is then sand and stain them. These are the best hardwood floors you could ask for, they’ll last 100 years and you can refinish them many times and always change the stain color.
Laying unfinished Red Oak hardwoods and then paying someone to refinish it, is a little more expensive than just laying a pre-finished engineered hardwood, but the quality is second to none. After the hardwoods go in, I’ll then trim out the house on top of them.
What you see here is about half of the red oak hardwood I bought, I am doing 1200 of the 1850 s.f., which is the whole house minus the two secondary bedrooms.
Good choices, Tom! Legit oak floors will give the house the period feel that it needs. I haven’t seen other renovators do it but it’s definitely worth it. You pick it up from Golden State?
oops typo, 2 1/4″ wide. Yea, I love the floors and have done them for years after first using them in Texas in 2006, I tried engineered and then bamboo on last 2 projects, but nothing compares to real hardwoods!
Love the idea of using unfinished and finishing them. I can’t wait to see them finished. Do you know what color stain you will be using yet?
House is really coming along.
Hey Danny, I’m going with Golden Pecan stain and possibly mix in just a tad of Colonial maple to give it more red tone. It looks great on brand new Red Oak and comes out fairly light but showing all the rich red tones of the wood. All wood floors take stain differently, the older the house the darker the wood will take stain too, we learned this with some of those 1920 Craftsman renovations. The brand new wood looks clean but just using the Golden Pecan wont add enough color. We’ll see, I always throw down some samples after sanding to see what looks best.
This weekend I was in San Antonio and I saw your redo of my former house in Terrell Hills (I lived there from 1958-1965), and I was very pleased to see that you kept the integrity of the house and did a lovely renovation (the original house had also been quite lovely). About 10 years ago I had driven by the house and I was distressed to see it abandoned and overgrown, so this time I was really happy to see that you had brought it back to life. Thanks!
That’s great Diane. Glad you liked it. The previous owner let it go downhill apparently. We had to take it completely apart but it was fun. Thanks for contacting us.
I am afraid to ask but anyway, do you know the cost per sft. for the hardwood floors?
I know this is going to be “California pricing”…
The Red Oak is the same as we used in Texas, in fact here guys lay 1/2″ instead of 3/4″ but we used 3/4″. The price is $1.99 s.f. here and in Texas. You can get it through flooring distributors or even Lumber Liquidators.