The Darker Side of Hardwoods

This past November we moved into a new house with some beautiful hardwood floors. They are the exact color I would have picked if I had been designing the house myself. They're a darker wood with some lighter patches mixed in- some coffee colors combined with cocoa if you will. Those are probably not terms professionals use to describe floors but hopefully you get the gist. 

In our previous home, I always felt like the color of our floors, combined with a few other factors, made it feel very dated and while they were great floors in terms of their condition they weren't my favorite. But fast forward to me seeing the new floors in the house hubby found once we knew we were moving and I was thrilled. 

I love watching design and renovation shows on HGTV. I don't consider design to be a skill of my own but I sure do love to watch other people do it. So as we moved into our new home, I found that the aesthetics reminded me so much of many of the homes I'd fallen in love with on HGTV and thought "Perfect! It's just what I wanted!"

But do you know what they don't mention on those shows when they show the clients their new beautiful dark hardwoods? That every single crumb, piece of dry grass, hair, dust particle etc is visible against that dark background. I mean seriously, I have never swept floors so often in my life and I am positive we are not making any more mess than we were at our old house. It's just now my eyes are forced to look at the mess until I can get a broom across the floor. 

I hadn't paid much attention to this fact upon our initial move in. Sure there was dust and debris but I thought surely that's just from moving and boxes and unpacking and so on. And then we had family in town the week after we moved in..because we're crazy like that. And my mom being the kind, thoughtful person she is was sweeping my floors for me. She commented how awesome it felt to sweep my floors because it was so satisfying to see all the things you were actually sweeping up. This peaked my attention and she continued on..."You'll want to sweep these pretty regularly because everything is going to show, but just look how satisfying it is to sweep up!".

She was very right and very wrong at the same time. Yes, you can see everything and yes I do need to sweep often but the satisfaction of how obvious the cleaning is as you go? That part fades when you're sweeping for the 3rd time in one day...

I still love my hardwoods, they are still exactly what I would have picked. They've just made me much more thankful that I registered for such a nice broom for our wedding! 

This month I am linking up every day with "Two Writing Teachers" as part of their Slice of Life Writing Challenge. Thanks for stopping by!