What kind of floor do you have?

[lupinfarm]

My cousin has a log cabin, and built a log cabin addition onto it. He had a lot of old growth Hickory trees cut down to built his addition. He had them milled into flooring for the cabin. It is STUNNING!!

Hickory is GORGEOUS but mum loves the Birch. If we can't get the birch, because it is quite a popular floor (for a great price too! $2.99/ sq. ft.), we'll go to the Hickory ($2.99/ sq. ft.) and if the Hickory isn't in stock we'll take the Oak ($2.95/ sq. ft.)

We'd been looking at a flooring company locally and they quoted at about $5.00/sq. ft. for Hickory, so we started to look elsewhere and went to a a big flooring and wood depot type store in Peterborough, all solid hardwoods, great prices, and we even found our ideal banister set up for upstairs!

 

[Dace]

In our first house we had original 1940's hard wood. Wood is ALOT of work!

In our last house we did a textured ceramic tile....super easy with kids...muddy shoes, bikes, skates & skateboards

This house has stone....pretty indestructible and easy to clean.

 

[ducks4you]

Have you considered linoleum? (NO, I DON'T been vinyl--there's a difference!) Linoleum was invented in 1865. It's made of natural materials. You repair nicks with same material. It's VERY hard wearing. Just a thought...
http://www.armstrong.com/flooring/products/linoleum

 

[Tracylhl]

Thanks everyone. I really do want wood. Most of our house has tile (which is poorly installed and in time we will replace with wood as well) but the master bedroom and loft area that my boys use as a bedroom is carpeted (the the stairs to the loft). The house was built in 1995 and in Florida in any home that isn't over 100 years old, it's totally unheard of to have hardwood subfloors. Just poured concrete. We've had plenty of carpet, vinyl, tile, laminate, and floating wood floors through the years in other homes. I really dream of doing what Scott did and dismantling an old structure to use as flooring but I don't think that's going to work for us. Partly because of the "nailing or glueing in humidity" thing and partly because of the time and expense. I guess that the floating engineered hardwood is the way for us to go. Someone, though, mentioned one of my big issues with it - the scant top layer. I don't want something we have to rip up in 15 years because we can't sand it down. I really want something that we could sand down when needed and it would still look lovely (although loved and worn) in 80 years! I want "real", not "engineered", y/k? I'm going to have to look into the hardwood planks grown in humid climates but I was under the impression that if you glued or nailed those down, they would still swell too much in our climate.

 

[Mackay]

Look at Cork. It is georgeous and resiliant. You can mend it also.

 

[Kim_NC]

Thanks for the compliments on the cookstove.

Really fun to see everyone's flooring and projects in this thread!