Pending

Well last night we settled on what the seller would give us back from our inspection requests. They’ve agreed to kick us back some money for almost all of what we asked for so we are happy about that. The transaction is now officially “pending”. The closing date is still set for the 17th of December but if everything goes smoothly here on out with the appraisal hopefully we can get in there a little earlier.

We’ve paid for our current rental through the end of December so that will give us a couple weeks to do a little work on the house before we move in. The two main things we are planning to do are remodeling the kitchen and putting in some hardwood floors. We originally wanted to go with a dark stained bamboo flooring. We both like the way it looked and bamboo is a more sustainable product than other hardwoods because it can be harvested after only a few years and grows back very quickly. But after doing a lot of research and we have decided against the bamboo. It sounds like most people have problems with the bamboo floors denting and scratching very easily. We do have a limited budget for this project so we wanted to stay around $3/sf. There aren’t a lot of options at this price range.

Simplefloors.com has a large selection of products and I think we settled on an engineered maple floor. It differs from solid hardwood in the it has a fairly thin layer of maple and then layers of other woods underneath. The benefits of this are it is much cheaper and it can be floated, as opposed to nail down or glue options with solid hardwood. This makes installation much easier. It can only be refinished a couple times since the maple layer is thinner so it won’t last nearly as long as solid hardwoods. Simplefloors.com has a few retail stores in California and is actually having the grand opening of their store in Seattle today so we are heading down there tonight. They have sent us some sample but it will be nice to see large samples. We really like the Dark Eagle color and will likely end up getting this one.

We are getting our kitchen cabinets from IKEA. They have simple, modern styles that are hard to find at such great prices anywhere else. With a limited budget, this is obviously very appealing. The cabinets will look something like this photo.

But before this we need to scrape the popcorn off the ceilings (asbestos!)and remove a wall .
So that’s the plan. I’ll keep this updated with our progress and some photos.

And just for fun, some weird IKEA commercial in German:

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