Breezeway 11: the new new floor

Pardon the long silence - we've been reveling in our new floor but also suffering through the long staining and finishing process. Bottom line: we have a LEVEL FLOOR!

Here's the line between the living room and new room:

Our old floors are so uneven that they had to do a lot of work to fill it, build it up, and then sand it even:

This is the line between the dining room and kitchen. You might remember this identical view with the first floor here. In fact, why don't I just repost that key picture below the current one, so you can see the amazing difference.

There was an interesting moment where they cut a wire while carving through the subfloor. That was fun. They had to pull out the cabinet and call in an emergency electrician to fix everything. 

On days 1 and 2 of the new floor, our dining room was out of commission because of all the sawdust and tarps, so we had a picnic in the new room:

Then on days 3 through 5, we mostly had to stay off the floor completely (we could tread lightly in socks to get things out of the fridge, but that was it). We only just opened up the room to the cats this morning (after giving them pedicures so that they couldn't do much damage when they inevitably skidded on the ultra slippery floors).

We didn't manage to get pictures on day 3 when they stained it, and day 4 when they did the first 2 of 3 layers of poly, so here it is, in all its shiny, freshly polyurethaned glory this weekend:

For comparison, we do have a test strip. So the top of this picture is the new kitchen floor, the bottom is the existing dining room, and the single slat shows the unstained wood on the bottom and the stain without polyurethane on top. Our builder says the color will age and yellow a bit over the next few months and get even closer to our old color. And funny enough, the match is even closer at the living room line. I guess the dining room area is a bit more worn out.

So what's left on this project? Some stuff isn't finished because of subcontractor scheduling delays (a little more electrical work and the base board heater this week, for example, and the Pella door people unable to show up until mid-August) and some stuff is "finished" but needs tweaking. This week we are giving that list to our builder as the final "fix this before we finish paying you." We have lots of tape around to show what we want fixed, but I think we are in the home stretch.