Life With Wee People: Put your building samples to the test...
Fun is letting your kids abuse your building supplies (LOL). If you are going to install flooring you should buy a sample and put that puppy to the test. If you read my blog you know that my kids are not shy and every so often something gets destroyed by accident or design (making them the ideal test subjects for experiments in durability - silly grin).
Building Direct is kind of cool because they invite you to beat, bash and inspect their samples. We consider that minion friendly advice and decided to give their sandstone, marble, granite, slate and engineered hardwood a run for its money. We even threw in the peel and stick vinyl stuff because it looks like wood, cleans easy, is reasonably priced and a kid friendly project for the lanai.
The Little Minions spent their holiday weekend scratching the floor samples with their toys, drowning them in the tub, drying them in the sun, walking on them like stepping stones, tossing them onto the rug and lawn and incorporating them into their building blocks for Hot-Wheel-NASCAR and Thoms the Train adventures.
The "sun walking" was a particularly brilliant idea. Turns out some materials warm up and hold heat faster than others.
We're not sure if the thickness plays a factor or the composition of the materials (maybe both?) but the engineered products felt better under our toes during our cooling/heating outdoor experiments than the tiles and stones. It's all fabulous building materials but my kids have a sensory preference so I'm bowing to the wee people since home is their fave space to run amok and play.
We wanted to be fair with our toe tests so we tried them all at different times during the day and realized drowning them in the tub may have gently warped a few wood products (making our toes a wee bit picky regarding the bare foot sun test).
Turns out these were more minion proof when push came to shove:
All of the samples were very cool to fool around with and are great to work with for a number of interesting projects we're cooking up.
I'm sketching what I want to do and am looking forward to ordering more material from them. Turns out I prefer high density fiberboard. It has great moisture resistance. Mr Autism and Mr PDD-NOS also enjoyed playing with it and the engineered hardwoods are easy to manipulate and install. The boys want to line their custom toy and art boxes with the click maple engineered flooring and put down the Vesdura vinyl flooring in our art spot instead of slate. It's textured and feels really good on our toes...
FYI: They learned a new word from the DIY Network: Banquette. Being visual learners they want to take a crack at creating a couple of custom storagebox seating sets to park their stuff. Turns out piano hinges are not that expensive so we're making a tools and materials list to design custom wee people seating.
Stephen thinks we should install the flooring on the walls and floor of a workshop play shed so it will all match.
That might actually work...
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