The blog post reflects on a home renovation journey, starting with utility room upgrades and expanding beyond. It highlights decision-making challenges, evolving plans, and balancing aesthetics, functionality, and comfort while addressing scope creep and budget considerations.
My wife and I have spent the week after Thanksgiving in our coldish house up north working on the planning the renovation of our kitchen and utility room. We are very thankful that we have this house surrounded by beautiful trees and now with several inches of snow surrounding us. We are further thankful that we have the resources to be able to improve the house, making it more comfortable and pleasant to be in. And this week has been chilly with our new fall electric mini split heating system barely able to handle the heating load required by the cold December weather.
Doing a renovation project can be a fascinating learning experience in scope creep. I describe some of our project evolution and how our experiences and research led us through many different concepts as we endeavor to arrive at a final “best we can get to” project plan to have a most comfortable and pleasant home.
Our current renovation project flowed from the removal of our fossil fuel furnace and going all electric while making space for a washer dryer and additional toilet and sink. Since we were already renovating the utility room adjacent to the, maybe it is time to do the kitchen renovation we had been thinking about for a long time. We could have a functional easy to use drawers and cabinets and a sink which will be easy to wash pots in.
As then looked more carefully at the kitchen floor, and saw an old and worn tongue and groove pine floor. There are many many places with cracked tongues and grooves. Repair might be possible but seems unwise as it would require lots of labor and likely would not last long.
We decided to put in a sheet Marmoleum floor like the one we’re so happy with at our primary residence…… But we soon learned at a flooring store that sells the product that installers who can do a good job of installing Marmoleum are very hard to get and very expensive, charging over $25 a square foot, and even if one is willing to pay it can be very hard to get them out to do the job. So, we backed off of our sheet Marmoleum plan, and pivoted to the easy to install floating floor Marmoleum click together tiles. But after visiting a friend who is very unhappy with his Marmoleum floor we opened our minds to other possibilities.
Many people in the area suggested that “wood floors are what people do around here”. Our house is in the woods, has wooden beams, wooden floors, many wooden windows and wooden sills, so for aesthetics and durability, we decided that we will install a wooden kitchen floor.
Deciding on having a wood floor is just the beginning of a difficult decision process of what flooring to use. Wooden floors may be solid wood or engineered flooring made from a combination of woods. Also, solid wood may be factory-finished or finished in place, while engineered flooring is always factory finished. We wavered between the choices through multiple showrooms, conversations and research. Many times feeling like we were close to a decision and then having our choice change again, and again.
A friend called for an unrelated reason and we began speaking with her about floors as they had recently installed a kitchen renovation. We learned from them that they chose to replace all the floor surfaces across the first floor of their house to maintain their home design integrity and achieve a feeling she liked in their home. The floors are the aspect of their “kitchen” renovation project with which she is most satisfied and happy about.
Hearing about the whole house floor renovation experience brought front and center to our minds the concerns that we and others have had, that after we replace the kitchen floor, seeing the old floor in the living room through the kitchen doorway would give a feeling of old tiredness of the living room part of the house, as it would be visually compared with the new kitchen. I immediately got up from my chair and measured the square footage of the rest of the house while my wife and I both adjusted our concepts of the floor project to now include the entire house. Whole house is 4 times the area of only the Kitchen. (Kitchen 223 sf / Whole House 986 sf)
I sat down at my computer and searched for more information about flooring and the range of cost and quality to take this now bigger project into high gear. I clicked on the first link of my first Google search; I then selected the first sample that appealed to my eye and read the specs which listed it as oil finished. Just the day before we visited a well-respected flooring store and were convinced by the salesman that oil finished flooring may be the best choice for our situation and preferences. I opened the “details PDF” and saw that it is usable with under-floor heating. WOW! I realized that under-floor heat is a possibility. A quick Google AI summary showed me that adding under-floor heating throughout the house would likely add $8- $15 per sf. to the cost of the floor and as such be very costly but a potentially manageable increase in the total project cost. Having a plan already to replace the floor throughout the house adding under-floor heat seems like a relatively small increase in the overall scope and complexity of the project.
I sit here in our living room writing this post feeling chilly with the mini-split heating units doing what they can on this December evening. Next December I could be sitting here in a toasty warm house, though it might require more electricity to run the heating system. This scope creep could provide us with a much more comfortable home in cold weather. Or, we could install a wood stove, a different scope creep which I may explore a bit later.