Home buying thread

Well, with my 9-year old we mostly just have to worry about food spillage, and no issues there. My 6-year old though, he uses the breakfast bar for crafting, and so far we've had to wipe off glue, pen, crayon, marker, as well as food. The worst thing is Ribena, I can't remember if you have that in the States, but it's blackcurrant squash. It's all come off fine, even if we didn't get to it right away, and with granite, you have to worry about staining with things like Ribena.

Intrinsic said:

The floors look good too.

Click to expand...

Therein lies a tale. Our house is a typical 1930's UK house, i.e., none of the walls are true or square, and the floors are not exactly flat. We have suspended wood floors, consisting of joists with tongue-and-groove planks, which is fairly typical. They're now almost 100 years old, and although they don't look terrible, there is a definite lack of flatness. Not much of an issue if you're doing a single room, but we did the entire ground floor. We bought a load of engineered oak herringbone at a great sale price, but then when we went to get installation costs, I almost stroked out. The install cost was about 4x what it would have been for plank, due to all the additional preparation work needed. Basically, due to the vastly increased number of joints compared to long plank flooring, the sub-floor needs to be much flatter, and you can't 'bodge' it as you can with plank, as any issue gets multiplied across a big run, again due to the number of joints, but live and learn, and we love it now it's down.

Long story short, if you want a herringbone floor, get quotes for installation before buying the actual flooring! Probably not such an issue with a new build though.