Karen and Percy Byers of Falling Waters, West Virginia took a long time to decide what floors to install in the kitchen of their split-level house, starting with a flooring shop in their area. “We were looking for something older looking and something made (and grown) in the U.S., “ Karen writes. The flooring store showed them the most popular “distressed-look” floor, but Karen says she found them all too “manufactured” looking.
“Nothing looked ‘real’ and we didn’t see anything that appealed to us,” she said.
So, the Byers shopped around to three or four more stores, finally returning to the first store where a salesperson showed her samples of a Carlisle floor. Karen liked what she saw and went home and looked up Carlisle on the Internet.
The next challenge was deciding on the type of floor. Karen wanted something light- to medium-colored, while her husband wanted dark wood. They had medium oak cabinets in the kitchen and a recently added porch had blocked the sun coming in, so Karen was worried about something that was too dark. Oak was out because they wanted a contrast to their cabinets.
“My husband liked the grain in Oak and I liked the swirly patterns that come in Cherry. We almost settled on Pine, but neither of us were 100 percent okay with that decision,” Karen writes.
Working with Lauren Fanti at Carlisle, who sent the Byers many samples, the couple finally “fell in love” with the Walnut. “It was dark, yes, but it had a lot of lighter colors running through it. It had the grain he wanted and the swirling I liked,” Karen said.
Still, Karen got her husband to agree that if, in the end, the floor made the kitchen look too dark, they would paint the cupboards.
All that thought and planning paid off! Karen says it was very hard for her to judge how a more dark floor would look from a sample and trying to imagine it where her current white floor was. “We are so happy with our decision! And the distressing! We didn’t expect it to be as beautiful as it is!” Karen wrote. “We love how some boards are more golden than the dark; how there are tiny holes that go clean through; how there are cross marks on some of the boards (like the grain naturally goes the length of the board and then you see it going across). It’s beautiful!!!”
Neighbors have come to inspect the work and approved, Karen says. “When my father came over, the first thing he said was how it looks like an old-time floor that you’d see in a 100-year-old house. That sort of hit the nail on the head—that’s what we wanted to achieve.”
Posted on Aug 09, 2009 AT 11:39 PM in (0) Comments
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