Wonders Underfoot 新地板

It's amazing what a new floor can do for a house! When we arrived at the house in Beitou, we spent hours mopping up concrete dust from the original floor.

This is what the original floor looks like. You can see where the cement guys working on the walls didn't totally clean up the floor. The floor itself is ground down with a machine that almost nobody has anymore. To take care of this floor, you have to wax it, apparently. Everyone we talked to said it was so outdated no one knew how to properly maintain it.

Hobbit feet for relative size reference. (Which relative, we wonder...)

This is the view from the living room window facing the dining room. Kitchen is off to the right. Lucky for us, the kitchen, the bathrooms and the master bedroom are all very nicely tiled.

View down the hallway looking back toward the living room.

Essentially the same view, but with the first strips of linoleum already applied. Someone from the flooring place dropped off materials in the morning. A few hours later, a scooter arrived, driven by "the master," as he was referred to by the materials driver. The maestro went to work quickly while we ensconced ourselves in the bedroom. This picture was taken about an hour into it.

Here he's laid down all but the edge strips. Quite a transformation!

Yes, all our materials are MIT! No, that doesn't mean Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Around here, it means "Made In Taiwan."

We debated about wood, bamboo, fake wood over particle board or MDF...it all came back to linoleum. With the moisture around here, it's best just to glue linoleum directly to the concrete aggregate. Cheaper, too. If you don't like it, glue over it! One way or another, you have a vapor barrier now.

Here's Ping just after the maestro finished up.

She's on the phone in the only place in the house we get cell phone coverage! We leave the phones perched in the window frame and sprint madly from wherever we are in the house to answer them...just like a land line!

Wow! What a difference. This is the first bedroom on the right as you go down the hallway.

Okay, it's an OLD building. None of the corners are particularly square. Here's what the flooring guy had to work with, trying to get the corners to line up. Clearly, there was only so much he could do!

 

  What? No quarter-round to trim off the "baseboard?" No. We had quite a conversation with the maestro who told us he didn't do caulking. We called the flooring folks back and asked if they could finish the edges so they didn't look so uneven. Two guys showed up the next day and taped off everything very carefully. Then one guy caulked the whole edge with "same color" caulk. Not bad, really. We're waiting for the caulk to cure before Mark peels it away, hoping to leave a nice clean edge. We'll keep you posted!

Sure is nice to have a clean floor to walk on! We dry mop it every day. It's great to walk around now and not feel like you're picking up dust the whole way! Plus, it lightens up the whole house, which is a good thing, since natural light is not easily forthcoming in this tight alley with multi-story buildings on all sides. We're very happy to have the new floor!