Good Things Come to Those Who Wait!

Back in April I finally had McG talked into taking the wall down between our kitchen and living room.

This is what our kitchen looked like BEFORE...

and this is what it looked like once the wall was down.

It opened up the flow of the house and we love it!  But doing this left us with one dilemma...a space between the two floors that looked like this.

The original floors we knew were from Bruce Flooring in gunstock colour.  We contacted the company that installed the floors originally and we could order a new box for approximately $150.00.  I felt that was too steep a price, since we didn't need a full box...we really only need about 8 square feet.  We had a few pieces here that were leftovers from when the original floors were installed but it wasn't enough to do the whole spot that we needed.

We checked out our local Habitat Restore but they didn't have anything close to matching.  I scoured Kijiji (local Craigslist) and did find one option but it was snapped up before we could get there.  We tossed around the option of filling in the smaller section with the wood we already had and then using an "accent tile" as an option for the center section.  But I felt that would look too deliberate.

Then a few weeks back we stopped into our local Home Depot.  For fun we went to the flooring section to see if they offered our floor..they didn't.  We stumbled on some clearance flooring at the back of one of the aisles and to our amazement there was a box of "Bruce" flooring in the pile.  It took us a few minutes to get it out so we could look at it and what we found inside was what we thought would be a pretty close match to our flooring.

McG scouted out a salesperson to see what the price of the flooring would be.  They guy told us $35.00 for the box since it wasn't a full box and was basically all that was left of that particular kind. He gave us a piece of it and we drove home to check it out against our flooring.  The width and finish of the wood matched ours perfectly, however, the colour was just a hair lighter.  We decided that for $35.00 we would take the chance and use it since we could mix it with some of the other flooring we already had here.  We went back to the store to buy it.

When we got there the guy that had given us the price was no where to be found.  The cashier called up another flooring employee and she ended up giving us the box of flooring for $30.00 - an even better savings!

We brought it home and sat it in our spare bedroom for a couple of weeks to acclimate it to the humidity levels of our home before installing it.  This past Thursday night McG installed it.  He was finally able to use his floor nailer that we purchased to put flooring in at the other house.  (We decided on laminate and he never did use the nailer).

It went in pretty smoothly and you can hardly tell the difference between the two floors.

The new floor is the three rows between the two arrows below...

Sometimes great things come to those who wait!!  We are loving our finished floor!