The Super Official Homeowners Thread

[.RJ]

more than a ZJ

[JPolen01]

Can confirm drywall guys are craftsmen of another era. They do hard fucking work and it looks great. They turned my hack job drywall work into smooth, flat walls.

[.RJ]

To keep me distracted from the broken ass stove.... rendering for the new kitchen layout





cabinets will be white/slate blue like this



We are waffling between hardwood floor and vinyl plank, anyone used the latter?   Contractor is pushing us toward the vinyl plank - its cheap and he says its easy (read: cheaper) for him to install and holds up awesome to kids/dogs and is waterproof.  I'm not sold on the look/feel and hardwood is always going to look good and have good value at resale.  We'll be using the same floor across the whole level and will do the upstairs hallway/office space later with whatever we choose downstairs.

Either way I like the look of hickory, either real or fabricated in LVP.

[JPolen01]

Love the two tone cabinets and island.

Have you looked at engineered hardwood? I've always been able to tell when flooring is vinyl. Haven't seen anything that wows me. Engineered is a good price point between the two. If you're dropping money like this on a kitchen I can't imagine putting vinyl flooring in.

[ViPER1313]

I have 4 years on cherry floors, holding up well. The cost difference between getting 3/4” solid wood installed via a nail-down installation on 750sf was only marginally more than doing a floating install with an engineered material (you don’t have to purchase the underlay, just a thin vapor barrier material.) You can also refinish them repeatedly.

I wouldn’t make a crazy investment on flooring unless you go with a more classic look. All these scraped hardwood / patterned / rustic floors are really in vogue right now but probably won’t be in 10 years, at which point it’s another gut job.

Edit: what I mean is that by the time most flooring is worn out, style has changed anyways and you might as well replace it to update the house’s look.

[HAULN-SS]

If you're going with a good artificial material floor, it likely won't be cheaper than real hardwood.

[ScottyB]

all the engineered hardwood installations i've seen look great to my eye and its hard to argue with the benefits of the interlocking planks. i love solid wood stuff but i can't imagine hickory would be cheap in that form.

we have vinyl plank up in our bonus room above the garage and it looks pretty good but its clear its not real wood. fine for our uses though and cleans up super easy.

[JustinG]

2.5 yrs in and our engineered hardwoods are ok. You can see dog scratches if you look real close. We are pretty anal about the kid building/crashing shit on the carpet in our living room if we are hanging out downstairs, vs a free for all on our floors.

I'd recommend a matte finish to hide dingo scratches, gloss shows way more. My friends have "real" hardwood floors, gloss finish, see every scratch from their dog and dent from a kids dropped toy. Our dog is a spaz, and if you walk around a corner unexpectedly she turns into bambi on ice and digs in.

Matte finish has helped hide scratches in the "Clear Coat", if the sun hits it just right you can see them.

Plus rugs at the bottom of the stairs and doors, where dogs usually dig in to get a head start up the stairs or out the door, have saved the heavy traffic areas.

Nothing has penetrated the color, except for the god damn socket and ratchet I dropped on day 2 of living here. But, i wasn't anything the included wax crayon couldn't fix though.

The old house we ripped up some carpet and put in some cheap laminate. It held up well to 2 dogs for 4 yrs.

But, if you are planning for resell, hardwood floors are going to be one of those boxes i feel like everyone checks, just cause.

[JPolen01]

Our engineered is holding up great after a few years. Not many scratches at all - no dog but we occasionally watch her parents dog for a week at a time.

I scratched it once moving a big planter and the other day Emily dropped a glass which pretty much exploded and looks line buckshot hit the floor. We have dark wood, matte finish.

My parents have real hardwood - dog died so they got them refinished. Decided to adopt another dog shortly after the floors are destroyed in less than two years.

[.RJ]

We want the same floor throughout the main level and engineered is a no-no in the kitchen & bathroom and I dont think the installed cost is really any less. I was impressed with the look/feel of the vinyl plank samples we took home and everything I've read says "yeah we know its not wood but it is no maintenance and holds up awesome to our dogs/kids/spills/sex parties so we love it". I just dont want it to be 2018's version of linoleum and when we go to sell the house in 10 years its not going to look good.

Its 100% for sure going in the basement later this year I just dont know about the rest of the house. I am a little worried that i'm going to ask for the price of site finished hickory and going to be like

[Sijray21]

We have 0.99 per sq*ft vinyl planks in the sunroom we put in. Come check it out sometime. It's the home depot Click-lock cheap price. Looks great, imo. I can't say for the long term, but we got it for the playroom. Looks better than the pergo in the rest of the first floor (other than the tile in the kitchen).

We put engineered hardwood upstairs in 2015 (read: can't sand it down and re-stain). I would not recommend if it's a softer wood. It's a matte finish, so it hides scratches well, but dents and things are kind of obvious and we can't do anything about it other than taking it up and replacing or covering. In a kitchen setting I'd avoid that.

[WRXtranceformed]

I didn't get to choose the engineered hardwood in our main level because we bought a spec home. They used a decently upgraded version (I forget the brand) but it's not aging well and we do not wear our shoes in the house, do not have kids yet, and have no pets. The biggest issue I have with it is not necessarily the wood itself, they put the expansion joint for the main level slab right through the middle of the damn house, so I have a separation through our kitchen and living room of about 1/8". Other than that, we've had a few issues with the edges of the engineered planks chipping and like I said, we are pretty easy on our floors.

I put the wood-looking vinyl in our townhouse before we sold it and it looked awesome. My brother in law also got the higher end vinyl planks with the matte and "hand scraped" finish, which actually looks really good (ie. like wood) and their two young boys are HARD on it and it hasn't shown a scratch. His litmus test was scraping a key across it before they bought it.

For my two cents you probably don't want because it's neither of your options:
After spending Thanksgiving in my uncle's 10,000sq ft.+ mansion in ATL, I am dead nuts sold on doing the tile that looks like wood in our main level when I have to replace this stuff in a few years. We had talked about looking into it but after seeing it in person in his basement (ie. laid on concrete slab) it looks freaking fantastic, is really durable and if for some reason you were able to scratch / damage / break it, it is tile so you can just crack it out and replace it. That's another big issue with the engineered / locked in woods....if you ever need to replace a few boards you usually have to replace everything all the way to the wall to get to it. With thin grout lines and dark sealed grout, you wouldn't have to worry about it getting dingy / nasty like you do in bathrooms.

[.RJ]

I had wood look tile in a bathroom in the last house and would have eventually put it in the basement had we stayed there and I'm a fan... but for a main level, I think it will be too cold/hard/expensive.  

I just talked with the contractor and vinyl plank, engineered and hardwood are all viable options if you choose the right products for this job.  He's going to show us some stuff later today - he said if we do go engineered we'll have to make sure we use a product that can be refinished later that has the right composition so that if there is any water later its not going to blow up the floor, and probably have to go a little wider to control for expansion/contraction.  Since this is above a basement I'm more likely to ruin the basement drywall than the flooring if the dishwasher explodes so that's good to know.  If it were on slab, we'd be having a different conversation I think.

I put the wood-looking vinyl in our townhouse before we sold it and it looked awesome. My brother in law also got the higher end vinyl planks with the matte and "hand scraped" finish, which actually looks really good (ie. like wood) and their two young boys are HARD on it and it hasn't shown a scratch. His litmus test was scraping a key across it before they bought it.

I am reading this a lot about the vinyl plank. It makes it really attractive.

[D_Eclipse9916]

For my two cents you probably don't want because it's neither of your options:  
After spending Thanksgiving in my uncle's 10,000sq ft.+ mansion in ATL, I am dead nuts sold on doing the tile that looks like wood in our main level when I have to replace this stuff in a few years.  We had talked about looking into it but after seeing it in person in his basement (ie. laid on concrete slab) it looks freaking fantastic, is really durable and if for some reason you were able to scratch / damage / break it, it is tile so you can just crack it out and replace it.  That's another big issue with the engineered / locked in woods....if you ever need to replace a few boards you usually have to replace everything all the way to the wall to get to it.  With thin grout lines and dark sealed grout, you wouldn't have to worry about it getting dingy / nasty like you do in bathrooms.

We did hardwood tile in the basement of our old house.  FANTASTIC!  Just make sure to not match it to whatever wood is on the stairs, otherwise it will look like a fake imitation.  Doing it significantly differently made it pop and not look fake.  I have never been asked by so many people who have seen it where to get it in follow up conversations after our Reno.  Not one person asked where we got our hardwoods 







Edit: Saw your post, yes too cold for all of main level. It's also HARD. Like walking on it in bare feet you notice how hard it is compared to hardwoods.

[.RJ]

varrry rustic look soooo pinterest many like wowowow so renovated

[WRXtranceformed]

For my two cents you probably don't want because it's neither of your options:  
After spending Thanksgiving in my uncle's 10,000sq ft.+ mansion in ATL, I am dead nuts sold on doing the tile that looks like wood in our main level when I have to replace this stuff in a few years.  We had talked about looking into it but after seeing it in person in his basement (ie. laid on concrete slab) it looks freaking fantastic, is really durable and if for some reason you were able to scratch / damage / break it, it is tile so you can just crack it out and replace it.  That's another big issue with the engineered / locked in woods....if you ever need to replace a few boards you usually have to replace everything all the way to the wall to get to it.  With thin grout lines and dark sealed grout, you wouldn't have to worry about it getting dingy / nasty like you do in bathrooms.

We did hardwood tile in the basement of our old house.  FANTASTIC!  Just make sure to not match it to whatever wood is on the stairs, otherwise it will look like a fake imitation.  Doing it significantly differently made it pop and not look fake.  I have never been asked by so many people who have seen it where to get it in follow up conversations after our Reno.  Not one person asked where we got our hardwoods 







Edit: Saw your post, yes too cold for all of main level.  It's also HARD.  Like walking on it in bare feet you notice how hard it is compared to hardwoods.

Yeah that looks really awesome!  What I also like about tile vs. the engineered "snap together" hardwoods is that you can lay patterns in it.  My uncle had his contractor do normal parallel laid tiles and then a few perpendicular designs and it looked like some of the custom true hardwood plank designs you see in high end homes.  Much rich, very posh

[Jake]

I was going to come add a +1 for the wood-look-tile that DJ did in the basement. I liked it. Thanks for doing it after I moved out

My parents are building a place in Delaware and chose to do the fancy vinyl flooring. They have real hardwood in the current house and it's held up very well (since 1998, no refinishing) but there is a concern given being in a beach town, maybe getting a doggo or two, etc. so the vinyl should look nice but be less worrisome for keeping nice.

RJ, kitchen concept looks great, I dig the blue cabinetry. Very different but still classy (<-- I'm stealing that line for my Tinder).

[.RJ]

Beach/Lake/Water house, vinyl plank all day long do not pass go.

Jake, are they retiring?

[WRXtranceformed]

I dig the blue cabinetry.

Awesome choice for a Tinder profile.  I wonder what kinds of guys this would attract

(yes, I know which line you meant  )

[.RJ]

Maybe thats some kind of dude euphemism?

Jake try it out and let us know how it goes...