Decorating & Renovating
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Our tech team has launched updates to The Nest today. As a result of these updates, members of the Nest Community will need to change their password in order to continue participating in the community. In addition, The Nest community member's avatars will be replaced with generic default avatars. If you wish to revert to your original avatar, you will need to re-upload it via The Nest.
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Thank you.
Note: This only affects The Nest's community members and will not affect members on The Bump or The Knot.
Flooring - choice of wood
We'll be ripping the carpet out of the upper level of the house we are (fingers crossed) closing on this month.
The lower portion, including the stairs up, have maple floors. The current owner replaced all of the doors and the windows in cherry. One of the rooms has a built-in media cabinet, in maple.
Would you continue with maple floors, or would you put in cherry?
Re: Flooring - choice of wood
Definitely maple!
It is significantly harder than cherry which means it won't scratch near as easily. Cherry is also one of the most expensive North American woods you can buy. I question that the doors and windows are actually even cherry or just something like birch stained to look like it. It's easy to copy. Also cherry is one of the most sensitive woods to UV. It darkens significantly over time with UV exposure. So the outline of every rug and piece of furniture you leave in one spot too long will show on your floor especially rooms that get a lot of light. It does eventually even out if you keep moving furniture for the first 5-7 years because the change in color decreases as the wood is exposed to sunlight.
Other option: natural hickory. The heart and sapwood have both of those colors. It is even harder than maple (the hardest wood in North America) so it will wear even less. It can look rustic and busy though. It's probably easiest to stick with maple but I'd thought I'd throw it out there. : )
No problem! Glad I could help.
I forgot to add that maple is regularly used for flooring on even heavily used surfaces like basketball courts, skating rinks, and bowling alley lanes (granted it also has an extremely durable poly finish in these locations but still).
We're going for a slightly rustic feel in our house and going with natural hickory. Then my dad is custom making us cherry trim in a craftsman style and we bought some upper expensive cherry doors (solid core and thick veneer). We've managed to successfully stain birch plywood that we used for the base of our built-in bookcase cabinet to look like the cherry face frame. And we'll do the same with our pine windows (it won't be as good of a fake as birch is though). Someday we're looking at going with maple kitchen cabinets. They all work to well together.
Maple. You could add a cherry border if it suits your style.
Our first house had all maple (with alot of Birdseye in it) and it was lovely. This house has red oak and I am happy with that as well.
I have nothing to add except that FoxinFiji knows her $hIt, and I would trust whatever she says. ;-)
Are you sure there's not hardwood under the carpet that could be refinished?
No, we checked.
It's plywood, though, so it should be easy to install hardwood over it. The trick will be dealing with the transition to the bathrooms. They installed travertine tile over whatever was there before, and then put in little ramps that they carpeted over because the extra tile layer built up a bigger step up into the baths. We may need to do another layer of plywood so that we don't have a trip hazard. I'm just going to trust that the flooring people can figure it out.
Consider joining the bone marrow registry
There will probably be padding between the hardwood flooring and the plywood, which may bring you up to level with the tile. Or, now that I think of it, maybe not? Mine was engineered hardwood because it was going over a concrete subfloor. Maybe you can only do that with "floating" floors and real hardwood gets nailed down without padding? Anyway, the floor folks will tell you.