Riverside Renovation: Crafting a Contemporary Oasis with Carlisle Wide Plank Floors

Imagine padding across soft, warm floorboards in your contemporary home on a lazy Sunday morning. As you sip your coffee and stare out the window, you’re greeted by the sight of towering evergreen trees and a sparkling river weaving its way through the Cascade Mountains. Pretty picturesque, right?

That vision is what led Alli Devlin to buy a riverside fixer-upper home that hadn’t been touched since the 70’s—without even really planning to.

Alli and her husband, Jeramey, had yet to experience renovating homes. “We’ve done some small things—you know, tiling here or there, paint here or there—in our prior homes, but we’ve never done something of this magnitude. We were like, ‘Let’s do this, we can do this!’” she laughs. “We just didn’t really know what we were getting into.”

A whole lot of blood, sweat, tears, and learnings later, Alli now shares home renovation content that has captivated and inspired thousands. Carlisle Wide Plank Floors partnered with Alli to ensure she had the perfect wide plank floors to bring her vision to life. She’s now the proud owner of her dream home—featuring her “forever floor.”

Designing a Vision

For Alli, it was most important to be clear on her vision. “We spent about our first nine months after we purchased the home in what I would call a design phase,” explains Alli.

Alli has two main recommendations for anyone considering home renovations: curate inspiration and pick a color palette.

Well before they bought their home—before social media, even—Alli was taking clippings from magazines and putting them into a folder of home inspiration. Then, she moved over to Pinterest, where she saved everything that caught her eye. “There is just an overwhelming amount of inspiration out there,” she says. To help narrow in on a design vision, she recommends returning to your Pinterest a few days later with clear eyes.

“Just look for the key themes. I thought, What was I pinning a lot of? I was pinning a lot of natural light and big open windows, and I was pinning a lot of White Oak and Walnut. And while I love a mid-century style, I was actually pinning more of a northwest, Japandi modern kind of style.” That process helped her focus on the overall themes and style to bring her vision to life.

The second design choice that helped her: picking a color palette and sticking to it. With her home renovation approach, she and her husband designed each room one by one over the course of a few years. Having a color palette ensured that each room worked well with the next, creating a sense of cohesion throughout the entire home.

For Alli, her color palette started with two wood tones: Walnut and White Oak. Then black—her favorite color—and white, for the airy lightness. Then jewel tones. Together, she has eight to twelve colors and wood tones that she can pull from for each room.

All these design steps meant that when it came time to pick out flooring, it was really a question of dark Walnut or White Oak. She wanted something lighter-colored as the base to reflect more natural light and make the space feel more open and airy. Conceptually, she was ready—but then it was time for logistics.

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Putting Theory into Action

Many people find flooring to be overwhelming. There are a lot of decisions, both practical and aesthetic, and it can feel daunting to commit to the investment in your forever floor. Alli was no exception.

While they knew they wanted White Oak and lighter tones in the wood, it was hard to really envision it. And making a big investment in flooring while undergoing other renovations, too, felt risky.

“We defaulted to some nice looking, very durable, inexpensive laminate floors, which were a wonderful decision for us for the first couple of years,” explains Alli. “But they were never going to be our forever floors.” However, the temporary measure gave Alli an opportunity to really understand her house, the natural light, what undertones she wanted in her flooring—and feel good about the investment. It was time to pick out her forever floors.

Durability was top of mind for Alli, who wanted an engineered floor that could be re-sanded. She was also set on having radiant heat, especially after tearing out the baseboard heating system from 1978. And, of course, she needed the quality of the floor to match up with her design vision. That’s where Carlisle Wide Plank Floors came in.

Decisions, Decisions

Even with a focused design vision, wood flooring comes with a lot of options. “You’re like; I know I want White Oak floors. But do I want a matte floor, or do I want a sheen? Do I want a Rift Sawn floor or Plainsawn? Do I want a wire brush, or smooth? There are just all these details that I don’t think you really think about until you have to make a decision like this.”

Alli loved how detailed Carlisle’s website was on every flooring option. But let’s be honest: it’s hard to make a commitment based on the internet. Alli worked with a Carlisle Wide Plank Specialist, Lynne Rafuse, and relied on samples to help her make the final choices. It was easy: Request samples online, they arrive at your door, and when you’re all set, you mail them back with a prepaid label to Carlisle to reduce waste.

Alli’s first round of samples helped her decide that for her contemporary design style, she wanted a smooth finish with less sheen and less rustic knotting. “Then I ordered a second set of samples to decide on the tone,” explains Alli. “I could then look and say, ‘Okay, do I like the straightforward tone? Do I like one with a little pink in it? Do I like the one with a little more brown or gray in it?’ That was sort of my research process.”

Finally, Alli selected her dream hardwood floors: White Oak from the Essentials Collection in Suede by Carlisle Wide Plank Floors, filled with the vanilla undertones she’d always envisioned.

A Seamless (Literally) Experience

Once the decision was made, it was smooth sailing from there. Carlisle experts guided Alli on the right amount to order, and the production and delivery of the floors followed the exact timeline. Everything was going perfectly, until Alli got a text from her husband.

“Is the flooring supposed to have a purple tint?”

Alli was in a meeting, silently panicking for nearly an hour. She frantically texted her husband back. Then he replied: “I’m kidding. It looks perfect.”

“Yeah, he’s still paying for that,” she laughs. “But—and this sounds so dramatic—when I got home, I just remember feeling blown away by just how beautiful the White Oak was. I mean, I’m just freaking out over White Oak! But what I love about these floors is there’s just this really, really beautiful variation. A couple of the first pieces I saw were these boards that had some of the warm brown with some of the blonde mixed into it. It was exactly what I wanted.”

 
Once they were installed, they exceeded all expectations. Not only do the wide planks reduce the number of visible seams, but “they are the most comfortable floors. They’re, like, soft,” says Alli. “They feel so good on your feet. We love them. We’re just over the moon with them.”

What’s next for Alli, Jeramey, and the Hoss Homestead? Enjoying the dream house they built—although, with these two, there will surely be more DIY improvements along the way. Follow along at The Hoss Homestead on Instagram and Pinterest.

Please note:  Flooring color in room scene photos may be lighter than actual flooring due to camera and lighting used.  We recommend ordering a sample to see more accurately the color variation found in our White Oak flooring called Suede in our Essentials Collection.