Well it’s been years of deciding what to do for our floors, weighing options and preparing budgets. We started simply poly coating our painted floors every year or so to save them, but the polyurethane has started yellowing and face it, cute as the painted tile and painted rugs were, they are still ” PAINTED FLOORS!”

So the stars aligned and we made our buy of the Dupont – Realtouch Elite Flooring – in Sand Hickory. This floor was a wider plank design and had a natural texture versus other products we had seen and although a bit more expensive didn’t require underlayment since it was built in. The installation boards themselves were also larger roughly 14 x 48 and not small individual planks as I had seen by other manufacturers which should make installation easier, faster and in my mind provide a more solid installation when completed.

So we made the buy at our local HD, rented their truck and moved the 57 cases of flooring into the main the room to a climate for a few days. I measured the room from all points checking for break points several times worried about how the board ends land against walls, stairs, and wood stove platform etc. All looked good, no slivers to worry about except maybe the end wall, which i could deal with.

I figured the best place to start would be on the long wall and work our way across, once half way we could move furniture on top of what was laid and do the kitchen and then the balance of living area. In theory I viewed the floor as three zones even though when done it would be one continuous slab of flooring when complete. If trouble arose such as cupping or the floor needed to be separated, I could break the floor near our steps to provide an expansion joint where it would be short and less noticeable . I was concerned on this matter because I hadn’t seen any literature the encompassed our type of installation.

So I got a couple days off and prepared for the worst and hoped for the best. Here are what the floors looked like before..

We moved everything over the left side of the house and prepared. We tore up our old carpet and pad along with 4 million staples used to hold the pad down and hauled it out. During this process we decided it would be best that we paint the walls while the moldings were off, so a quick trip to get the paint and we rolled away. We laid a couple rows of flooring and it looked real good we started to lay out the boards for the next course to check joint alignment and we found none of the boards had an end joint. How could this be? We opened another box laid it out same thing, another box same thing, are you kidding? We opened no less than 8 boxes all the same thing. Defective flooring? Just our luck…so we went to bed tired and pissed.

A awoke early and made tracks to Home Depot to explain my problem of how my house was totally a mess and I couldn’t lay any floor due to the defect. If I was to get more from them did it really have to sit 3 days? Needless to say HD didn’t have anymore flooring in stock in Rochester but Portsmouth had 60 cases. I drove to Portsmouth and explained my dilemma to the clerk. We grabbed a couple cases and opened them up to check them, and sure enough same trouble. The person was dumbfounded as i was and explained the head of flooring would be in in a couple hours. I left my number and noticed in the bright light a shadow and light edge….what?
I saw the clerk had written my number down improperly but left anyway saying I would return after breakfast. I called rose who was still home and asked her to fit a couple of boards together via ends…”Does it have a joint?”I asked, ” Oh my god…yeah” she said.
Wonderful I happy although still aggravated at how I could be so stupid. So i picked up the couple things I needed and returned to lay more floor.

I made it all the way across to halfway by around 6pm. Ryan and Tara stopped by to see our progress and I connected our TV for Survivor and we hung out and had a couple pops. Rose and i could see the new floor coming together as we hoped it would and danced a little to some music videos until way too late.

We awoke and I started where we left off, by moving all the china cabinet stuff out of the kitchen and getting the refrigerator moved out. Later this afternoon we had a group of people coming over to help pick-up the pool table and move it onto the newly laid floor so we could finish the demo and continue the new floor. I bought some casters and made dollies but come to find out it was unnecessary. With the army we had the pool table moved easily, which was a huge relief. I started once again on the floor and made good speed getting around the wood stove and through the kitchen. Oh while i was making the dollies, Rose took a tumble off a stool while painting the wall in the kitchen…Ouch! She ended up with a large scrape and a deep bone bruise but nothing broken thank god.

It was about this time Rose started pitching her plan to shift the living space around. She wanted to place the pool table where the living room and vise versa. I liked the idea, more room for the pool table, more open floor plan, but I just wanted to get the floor down and done before I would give a lot of thought to re-arranging the house. As it turned out we really liked the new floor plan and reset things accordingly. It really loosened the traffic pattern in the room up a lot.

It’s hard to explain the difference in the floor plan and the floors. To say we love it would be an understatement. So far two months later we still love the easy maintainence of them as well as the look and feel. I wish i had taken more in-process photos but hey, I was busy.

The pictures really don’t do the floor justice, and it is so nice to have the floors finished. Not just the job itself but really finished flooring. It was a long time coming.

At this point looking back two months later I think we did it all right. Other than Rose’s fall and my wasted half of day with Home Depot over my defective joint issue (not), and my making of unneeded dollies, I wouldn’t have changed a thing. The Dupont product went together better than expected, looks as expected, and maintainence has been easier than we thought.
Over all with the painting, carpet removal, flooring install , furniture moving, it took about three and a half days to get our 30′ x 40′ room back, but it is back better than ever.

Rose and I arrived in the Macomber visitors center and prepared our gear. This would be my second winter hike / snowshoe adventure and Rose’s first. I rented her snowshoes at EMS in Newington so we could see if snowshoeing agreed with her before making an actual purchase.

The route we are taking for today is the Zealand trail to Mt Tom Spur Trail. The Zealand trail is part of the AT. The round trip is estimated to be 4.6 miles. It was a cool day, but very comfortable when moving and certainly far warmer than my hike a few weeks earlier when freezing water bladders were a problem when we got up in elevation.There was still quite a bit of snow on the ground but far less than was here a few weeks earlier when Shannon and I hiked Mt Avalon. Initially Rose thought it would be easier to go without the snowshoes so she just booted it quite a while until the grade got steeper and she post holed a couple times. I went with the snowshoes all day. I booted it a lot last trip and snowshoes made it so much easier to walk. With boots it’s kind of like walking on a sandy beach. Also with boots if you step of the edge of the packed trail you post hole readily right to you’re crotch. This isn’t pleasant when you have a pack on and uses a lot of energy to right things.

Rose did excellent all day, she put on her snowshoes and as we started getting into steeper terrain and then we started really rolling along. We hit some very steep areas, as we did she kept getting gassed out every hundred feet or so. I explained what was happening was she was pushing to fast, even though in theory she thought it was slow and needed to go a bit slower still and use a walking rest step, once she got the hang of this we motored right along steadily.

Snowshoeing is quite an experience if you have never tried it but are familiar with hiking. To begin with there are no step ups or downs, read this as easy on the knees. The snow fills everything all in. Next the shoes can hold on very steep inclines (a very good thing) because since there are no real step ups or downs to hold rest on and the hills can go along way at steep angles. The Snowshoes allow you to simply motor straight on up the trail. My two trips have found the trails broken and well packed which i am told isn’t uncommon since there is more activity than you to tend to think on the trails. I am told in the winter you are more likely to get crisp clear skies and more views with foliage off the trees. Snowshoeing is a blast and I recommend everyone try it at least once.

Well, we had made slower time than anticipated and could see as we went the blue skies and twinkle of frozen icy trees at upper elevations awaiting us. The last 1/4 mile of trail approaching the column to Mt Tom is quite steep and seemed to take along to time accomplish. We made the the top of the column and laughed at the signs being nearly buried at our feet and headed toward the summit a half mile away.

I knew that Mt Tom didn’t have the greatest of views but figured with no leaves on the trees we should be able to get some. I had read that there were also some blow down areas that afforded views as well. Upon arrival at the summit we found that the clouds had arrived. We made the best of it getting occasional views of the valley below peaking in and out and had our lunch and couple cups of hot tea.
I setup for our summit picture and ran back to get in the shot and fell on my behind just out of the shot behind the scrub. This required us to try again the once we stopped laughing. (note to self, running in snowshoes use wider gait). After a good meal we started our return trip since the summit gods weren’t going to open the sky totally for us. The trees in this area had some interesting growths.

The return trip was much easier going than the climb as you would expect. We had amazing views of the southern presidentials and Mt Washington most of the way down. It was disappointing that our summit couldn’t clear for us but that is just the luck you have some days.

Rose enjoyed the snowshoeing and said she would love to do it again, so it looks like we are hunting for some snowshoes for her. We talked about doing Tuckerman’s Ravine the following weekend to see the excitement of the people skiing and so forth.

It was another wonderful day with my wife in t
he Whites!