From pretty much day one, there was one question that kept coming up:
“Is the blue carpet staying?”
Closely followed by: “What are you going to do about the blue carpet?”
And to be fair, we agreed. The carpet was going.
It was very blue, very loud and we knew it was going to make it difficult for everything else in the flat to settle in without competing with it. But removing the carpet raised a slightly more important question: what exactly were we going to do with the floor underneath?
Earlier on in the project, we lifted a little corner and found concrete. Naturally, we got excited. What’s cooler than a polished concrete floor? We could work with this. For quite a while, that was the plan.
Then installation began.
We finally got access to the flat, picked a day to tackle the floor and started pulling up the carpet. No going back. After a lot of tugging, cutting and wrestling, we uncovered…
Concrete. Wood. Tile. All at once.
Well, sh*t.
That was not quite what we had anticipated.
After a lot of standing around staring at it and trying to work out how on earth we were going to rescue the situation, we thought…plywood?
We started drawing up options and landed on sheets cut into squares laid almost like a checkerboard, with the grain alternating in each direction. We thought it would be warm, simple and fairly playful.
Perfect.
Until everyone started telling us how expensive plywood was.
Our budget did not sound anything like the numbers being thrown around, so we decided to go and investigate for ourselves. Off we went to Travis Perkins Vauxhall.
A very big shout-out to Junior and Martin, who talked everything through with us, helped us figure out what we actually needed and somehow sent us home with 11 sheets of plywood at a price we could make work.
And so, behold… the beginnings of the new floor.
Will it work exactly as imagined? Stay tuned find out.
Watch this floor.