Flooring and the Level of the Home

Most of the ground floor has engineered oak hardwood flooring. Engineered oak hardwood is real wood, with manufactured wood as the base. This particular oak is called "Valley Oak" and is made by Trafficmaster and comes with a 15 year warranty. Usually you can get one or two additional sandings from engineered hardwood flooring. It's glued in place, and installation was done by a professional contractor. This hardwood runs through the living room, dining room, master bedroom, secondary bedroom, halls and den on the ground floor. There's Italian travertine in the entry way, the same travertine that's in the kitchen.

The bathrooms have marble floors, in a light shade of coral. The staircase is covered in the same berber carpeting that is in all of the upstairs (except the upstairs bath which also has marble flooring). The berber carpeting is 100% nylon, a more expensive fiber, recommended for use on stairs because of its durability.

All of the flooring was installed in 2007, and remains in relatively good shape. The fireplace surround and floor tile is also marble, specifically black carrera marble.

Most rooms of the home are relatively level. We did contract with Gingerbread Construction of Los Gatos in 2009 to help level the floors of the home. While they did a good job in most of the rooms, there are some rooms where it would have been more damage than was worth it to improve the level. That includes the two ground floor bedrooms, where there is a little bit of a slope towards the outside walls. For the most part it's not noticeable and could be corrected, but would probably damage the tile in master bath and stucco outside the home.

As part of the leveling work, Gingerbread replaced many of the posts below the home, used in the post and pier foundation (you'll notice the foundation report talking about what good condition these posts are in). Gingerbread also installed some foundation anchors, but as you can tell from the foundation inspection, they are recommending some additional ones be installed (see the blog posting on the foundation)