Chocolate-y Goodness. Sort of.

Well after painting non-stop for about 4 days, the house was looking quite gorgeous if I do say so myself. And then Monday and Tuesday of last week, the hard-working men from the floor company came to install these beautiful chocolate brown hardwood floors. I absolutely love how they turned out and could not be more pleased. After putting the room back together, I snapped these pictures to capture the progress so far. There's still more to be done, but I feel like I've reached a major milestone here!

The company that I chose to do the floors was a local business called Kemp's that my uncle who flips houses recommended. He's used them before and rates them highly. I went there first, but also decided to check out other places including Home Depot and Lowe's. The two big guns couldn't come close to Kemp's.

The prices included installation which was wonderful and they did such a marvelous job. They took up the old carpet in one big piece which is now being donating to the local Habitat for Humanity. That was something very important to me and I'm glad they did that.

I chose to have the hardwood go all throughout the first floor and it looks amazing. I wanted to have cohesion between all the rooms since the floorplan is so open.

As far as caring for the floors goes, the first thing I did was stick felt pads to the bottom of every piece of furniture in order to prevent scratching.

Also, Kemp's recommended using Bona hardwood floor cleaner and a microfiber cloth, which could be found at Bed, Bath and Beyond. I told her that I hadn't heard of that before and that I was planning on getting something eco-friendly and she informed me that it was "green"! I did some more research and then we made the trip to BBB and found a Bona starter kit that came with a spray bottle, mop with microfiber cloth, cleaning pad and all in a reusable bag for $20. I had a gift card so I just used that for the kit.

After the flooring had been installed, there was dust EVERYWHERE so I vacuumed really well and then broke out the Bona kit to get started. The mop came together with ease and then I stuck the microfiber cloth on the bottom and went to town cleaning the floors.

It doesn't take much of the spray to get the job done so I'm glad to see that it will last a while and also, Bona has coupons on their website for when I do have to get some more cleaner. =] Yay coupons!

All in all I'm super excited about the new floors and if you're interested, here's a close-up of the floor next to the window:

I was attempting to capture the "essence" of the floors in this photo. I'm not sure that I did that, but I tried. ;-)

I'm off to bask in the chocolate-y goodness!