After the Flood

I suspect this is one of those thoughts I should probably just be keeping to myself, rather than sharing with the entire internet, but there’s a part of me – a teeny, tiny little part of me – that’s almost glad we flooded the house last week.

Almost glad, I said: I mean, obviously this was pretty much the worst possible timing for us to have to rip up and replace an entire floor (Not that there’s really a GOOD tome to flood your entire house, obviously…), but the fact is, if we hadn’t flooded the house, it wouldn’t even have occurred to us to replace the bedroom floor. Um, mostly because it was only about 3 years old, and that still counts as a “new floor” to me.

The thing is, though, we were pretty happy with that floor. Sure, it used to really annoy me that, although it looked white in person, it always seemed to come out as beige or grey in photos, but I figured that was just down to the general lack of daylight around these here parts. So, it wasn’t until the replacement flooring arrived last week that we realised what we thought was a white floor…

… wasn’t really a WHITE floor, was it?

No, it was not.

THIS, my friends, is a WHITE FLOOR:

(Er yeah, I’m just going to have to admit here that it’s STILL impossible to photograph it properly in December: there’s just not enough natural light, even with all of the windows open. You can take my word for it that this is a very white floor, though…)

At first I worried it was going to be be too white.

“I’m worried it’s going to be too white,” I fretted, as Terry and my long-suffering parents, who had come round to help (One of the few benefits I’ve found of of being 8 months pregnant: no one expects you to do this stuff…) struggled up two flights of stairs with planks of wood on their backs. “What if it’s too white?”

Terry put down the latest load of flooring, and gave me his best death stare.

“There’s nothing we can do if it is,” he pointed out. “Because we flooded the house 3 weeks before bringing a new baby home to it, and now it’s TWO weeks before we bring a new baby home, and we don’t currently have a bedroom floor.”

And he was right.

We did not have a bedroom floor.

Or, indeed, a single room in our house that was not now filled with building/decorating tools, or the assorted contents of our bedroom and en-suite. The en-suite itself, meanwhile, which Terry was using to cut the wood before putting it on the floor, was shrouded in plastic, like a Dexter kill room. The office was filled with bedroom stuff. The kitchen was filled with power tools and painting supplies. The hall was, once again, filled with cardboard and other rubbish. My head was filled with STRESSSTRESSSTRESS, as I paced the floors, absolutely convinced that I would go into labour at any second, and then come home to live on a building site.

Yeah, it wasn’t a fun week, all things considered.

Still, by Saturday afternoon, the floor was almost finished, and I’m relieved to say that my fears were unfounded: no, I didn’t go into labour, and no, I didn’t think it was too white. Actually, I absolutely LOVE it:

I know our decision to have white flooring in this room has always been a controversial one, with most people refusing to believe it’s not an absolute nightmare to keep clean. I’ve explained that it isn’t (and, actually, is WAY easier than the dark wood we previously had in here) so many times now that I’m not going to bother repeating myself: instead, I’ll just hope the fact we chose to replace one white floor with another, even whiter floor, will speak for itself on that point. As I said in this post, I like my house clean, but that doesn’t mean I love cleaning, so you can trust me when I tell you that if this kind of floor was anything like as high-maintenance as people think it is, we’d definitely have taken the opportunity to replace it with something totally different.

It really isn’t, though – and I think this one will be even easier than the last one, as, like our kitchen floor, which is also from Quickstep, this flooring has tons of texture to it, which I find makes it much easier to maintain. Sure, if we were to spill something dark on it, or trail mud over it or whatever, it would be more noticeable than on a darker floor, but if I spilled something, or trailed mud over my floor (And bear in mind, this room is on the 3rd floor of the house, so it’s not like it gets a lot of muddy foot traffic), I’d clean it up regardless of the colour of the floor, so… yeah. We’re happy. And also secretly quite pleased that we were forced to do this, because not only is this flooring water resistant, unlike the last one, it’s also  so much brighter than it, which, in turn, makes the entire room feel lighter, and more relaxing to me.

With that said, I never want to have to replace a floor, ever, ever again.

No, seriously, I mean it this time…