Flooring has arrived!!

The flooring has arrived! All 170m2 or 93 boxes. I have been VERY worried about this as I bought it from an auction house in Sydney...sight unseen.

It's Boral Silkwood in Sydney Blue Gum and I think the supplier said it was excess stock so I got it for a VERY good price, and insane $43/m2. I've been negotiating back and forth with this supplier for a good 5 months, bombarding them with questions and getting them to send me photos and references.

When it turned up I was surprised to see it branded as Harvey Norman. I got a quote from Harvey Norman for the same product and it was almost $100/m2 more expensive than what I bought this for. So you can imagine...I'm pretty happy.

I opened a few of the packets and laid them out on the floor. The timber is a beautiful pinky red grain and I've spoken to soooo many people who all say that the blue gum will darken and become more richer with time. The colour as it is fabulous, but if it darkens that would also be wonderful!

The floorboards are a "natural' grade as opposed to the premium "Australiana' grade, which means it will have natural timber imperfections like this small black mark. I'm completely fine with this, I think it adds to the character of the timber (and maintains the budget ;-p) and the installer said he puts any of the nastier bits into wardrobes and cupboards and saves the nicer pieces for the larger, more seen parts of the house.

I used the courier recommended by the auction house I bought the floorboards from. They were supposed to be loaded onto 2 pallets so they could be loaded onto his truck. When he got there they hadn't been put on palettes and the poor guy had to load 93 boxes, by hand, onto his truck. Each of these boxes are 2400mm long and weigh 16kgs. You can imagine, he wasn't very happy.

When it arrived on our end it rained, actually it poured, but only, I'm sure, on my house. Literally it was sunny at work and sunny in the suburb next to my house. Which made the site a soggy mess. My poor courier, he was super cranky. On top of that he had seriously underquoted - $350 for 2 tonnes of goods from Sydney, delivered into the house. He had to get extra labour help him unload. Even I knew I was getting a good deal, so I threw an extra $100 which is still way under what I had budgeted.

The original quote I had for supply and installation of this product was $25,500 and doing it this way, despite the stress and hours and hours of additional research, phone call, emails etc, saved me over $14,500 so I'm pretty happy with that :-).

Next step is installation and that starts on Monday!