One of things has always been to have a killer garage…and that always starts off with cool floors in my opinion. I recently bought a new house (I’ll have some sort of tour post in the future sometime), and it’s now giving me an opportunity to build my dream garage. Stage 1 of course is flooring.

While I was at SEMA back in November, I stopped at one of the booths for RaceDeck, a company that manufacturers garage floor tiles.  They had a great show special, and the final cost would end up being a lot less than if I were to order it myself…so even though I wasn’t necessarily ready to buy, they lured me in.  I’m glad I did.  Installation was a breeze, and the floor looks amazing!  Once the garage is all painted and lighted up, it will look that much better.  Here’s a little picture timeline of the install:

Here’s all the tiles ready to be installed:

Move all your stuff to one side:

Here we can see I’m getting started:

Then I realized I should probably start from the corner:

It’s growing!

The most time consuming part was definitely the checkered area, but still not too bad:

Repeat on the other side, and then done!

Of course here’s a pic with my baby in it:

You can order the floor through RaceDeck, as well as design what you want…they have a pretty good designer on their website that will tell you exactly how many tiles of each color you’ll need to order to match your design.  By the way, if you’re thinking that RaceDeck paid me to write this, or I benefit in any way, I am not/don’t.  Just providing a good testimonial for an awesome product and a company that gave me good service.

I’ve been looking at some houses from time to time, and I’ve really seen a dramatic change in what you can get for the price in this area. Back in July I looked at a house in Sterling that was a foreclosure priced at $365,000. I wasn’t all impressed with the house. One of my friends owns a few Champion real estate offices in this area, and sent me a listing for a house in South Riding, VA that seemed like a great deal. It was listed as a short sale, not exactly a foreclosure just yet, but getting there. We had found that houses that were much smaller in the area were going for more than this house was listed for. I decided to go take a look. The house was listed for $350,000, but although never 100% accurate, a Zillow.com search found it valued well over $400,000. Here’s some pictures I took:

It’s a pretty wide 2-car garage townhouse with I believe 2,600 sq/ft of living space. It was built in 2001, so it’s fairly new.

The colors are horrendous, but you can see the living and dining room when you walk in. The little walkway that I’m standing on has wood flooring. There is an ample amount of space here, and I like the column separating the dining room, as well as the step up to that level. The trimming everywhere also looks nice. There is also a bathroom on the right which you cannot see.

The kitchen is pretty nice, and was quite big. The countertops are granite, although looked a little cheap I guess due to unbeveled edges. Also, you can see the columns look a little cheesy, and needed to be repainted or something. While you can’t see it in the first picture, to the right there is a space for a some sort of deak, as well as a double door out to the deck. There is room here for another table or something, with a fireplace (kinda akward place to put one).

Here we can see the deck, pretty nice size (looks a lot bigger in person).

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