Adventures in DIY flooring

Adam spent most of the weekend working, but I managed to check a few nagging tasks off my ‘to do’ list while Hannah was napping. Love those long afternoon naps It’s always nice to start the week feeling more organized than the week before, and I’m hoping my freshly cleaned closet will make it just a bit easier to get dressed and out the door each morning.

One of the other little projects I tackled over the weekend can be seen in the photo above. It’s a subtle change, but I installed two of four transition mouldings in the hallway while Adam and Hannah were at the grocery store. When we installed the hardwood floors in the bedrooms, we didn’t think through how we would eventually transition each room to the hallway (we had to wait on the hallway flooring until after the stair reno).

The floors run perpendicular to each other, so if we’d thought it through, we would have avoided using cut edges in the doorways and butted the flooring together like we did in the hallway, where the flooring meets the stair nosing (please ignore the unfinished stairs!).

But we didn’t, and cut edges are meant to be hidden. We decided to use unfinished oak t-mouldings to transition between the bedrooms and hallway, and stain the mouldings ourselves to match the floors. I noticed that the stain on Hannah’s toy chest was pretty similar to the flooring, so I tried that first. After three light coats, it needed to be a touch darker, so I added one coat of the darker stain we used on the doors. It turned out to be a pretty perfect match.

I finished with two coats of poly in a satin finish. The moulding is barely noticeable, and I’m just happy that we found a solution that works so well.

We’ve lived with those rough edges for more than a year – first leading to ugly carpet, then to grungy subfloor and finally to more hardwood. The whole time I’ve been picturing this view (well, with baseboards) and it feels so good to finally see it. Sometimes it’s the little things.