1,850 Square Feet, Boxed

Because I suspect after Friday AM’s post that you might be curious about what 1,850 sq. ft. of hardwood flooring looked like, this:

That’s 85 boxes of 8-ft. boards, all of which we picked up in a 17′ rental Uhaul rated with a weight limit of 5,900 lbs. Pickup rental costs alone tacked an $100 onto our already very expensive home project, but was substantially less expensive than hiring local movers via Lumber Liquidators to do the job for us. Come to find, I looked at this opportunity kind of like I did moving in that it seemed easy enough, but in reality it probably would have been better just to hire out to get it done.

Our batch was just shy of the 17′ Uhaul weight limit, coming in at 5,841 according to the sales associate, and it took Pete, his sister, and his dad 5 hours to unload. They may or may not still have seriously sore muscles, and bruises, and stained hands from the purple ink on those boxes:

The flooring needs to acclimate in our house before install for another week, so we had no option but to unload it from the truck, put it everywhere, and surrender to chaos for awhile. Technically, it’s recommended for us to space out the boxes a bit and open them up to allow the boards within to breathe–as much surrounding airflow as possible is good during the acclimation stage of flooring–but we don’t have the space to do that with more than a few boxes at a time. This isn’t even all of them:

You might spot above that we removed slivers of carpet in both the living room and dining room; this was a strategic move, placing the boxes directly onto underlying underlayment, knowing that we wanted to live with the main part of the house carpeted for as long as possible, but wanted to avoid the task of moving the boxes a second time just to get the carpet out from beneath. Our house is kind of hacked apart at the moment, and what’s worse, the boards are blocking access to the broom and vacuum. It could get bad fast in here.

The sheer brainpower involved with laying hardwoods into a house you already live in is… unfathomable. But for as many ways as we could have reorganized all of our belongings, or however many times we could have decided to move them from room to room like mass musical chairs, we decided in the end to leave our master bedroom flooring for last, keep the carpets in place, aggregate everything else in the entire house in there on top of them, and work on the rest of the house (namely, the kids rooms and the hallway) as a priority. I’ll further explain the rationale separately.

Aside from moving the 5,841 pounds of maple flooring into the house to acclimate on Friday, we took advantage of having already rented the Uhaul and found another way to spend $900 by buying 30 4’x8′ sheets of underlayment, 30 tubes of heavy duty Liquid Nails, and wood screws (we’ve been using the SPAX brand 2.5″ to go into the joists, and 1-1/4″ to go into the subflooring between joists). Neither of us expected the thin plywood underlayment to cost $25 per 4′ x 8′ board, OMG, so thankfully the three bedrooms and the closets in the house are the only rooms that we should have to remove oak boards and replace with underlayment.

And with that, we have a lot of work ahead of us. We’ve gotten started on the kid’s rooms, and hopefully by the time the carpet is cleared fully into the living room we’ll have perfectly acclimated hardwoods to lay and the transformation will really start to unfold.