Day 18 to 23 – 6 to 13 October 2020

After a glorious weekend in Canberra, heavy cloud cover, storms and rain rolled in over night. Although the heavy rain didn’t dampen the spirits of the five builders who arrived promptly at 7.00am. They quickly got to work readying our space to install our new hard wood floors.

They were ready to go as the wood arrives at around 11.00amn.  Over 130 square metres of flooring will be laid, around 410 linear metres of Jarrah hard wood boards, each 130mm in width and varying lengths.

The flooring taking up most of our garage

They make a start at the Eastern most end of the house and hallway and start to work their way into the kitchen and living areas.

This next seven or eight days are all about the floor.  From dawn until dusk three builders work seamlessly together laying floorboards for five days straight.

Our final choice on flooring was not without its difficulties. We knew we always wanted a hard floor, as opposed to carpet. We’ve always had solid wooden floors, Sydney Blue Gum in the newer part of the house and original pine in the older part – designed as the original sub floor, which we have never covered.

We explored all manner of hard wood floors; laminated timbers, artificial timbers, rubber that looks and feel like timber and of course tiles. 

In the end and despite the heavy cost we circled back to solid hardwood. It is durable, will last a lifetime, insulative, and just looks magnificent.

Seeing it go down fills us with joy. The natural and varied colour and grain, the look and feel of solidness and the overall beauty can’t be beaten.

Each day more and more of our old tired pinewood floors is covered. The pine has served us well.  It was, is, the original flooring installed when the house was built 50 years ago. For the first 30 years of its life it was covered with carpet. We pulled the carpet up in 1999/2000 and then had it polished as part of our first renovation is 2002. It looked great, in parts still looks great, but 20 years of use has seen it worn down. The high traffic areas are bare, our office has seen a lot of wear and the boards were splitting and splintering. Cat scratches and claw marks from the dog adorn the hallway and corners. It is sad to see it get covered, but we are satisfied that it will remain as our sub floor and continue to keep our house up.

In between floor laying the team straighten walls in readiness for plastering and the electrician puts the finishing touches on our electrical layout. One big job remained on Tuesday, moving our data cabling and internet access. We have a data rack with 24 cat5 cables running throughout the house. When cat5 was all the rage and before WiFi was common place. He managed to salvage it all, although we don’t use many of the ports now, some will come in handy in the outer reaches of the house and to provide a stable connection for streaming services and our NAS.

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