Oh, hello there! You probably forgot that I even run a blog over here! Summer kind of took over life for a while there! We have been traveling so often (and having a blast!), it feels like we are only home to do laundry and mow the grass! And I suppose, lay some new floors!
Ever since we bought the house, we figured on putting in some new flooring. Whether it was new carpet or making the whole first floor more cohesive with wood, we weren’t sure of. We just knew we wanted to do something!
Well, we sort of got the kick in the pants when our sink backed up into our dish washer (note to self: no more orange peels down the garbage disposal). It then proceeded to leak underneath our laminate floor, making the whole kitchen floor bubble up. Yeah. That was a real fun few days. It obviously caught us off guard and we weren’t planning to do our floors just yet. So, we covered up the bubbling with a bunch of rugs for the time being.
It all happened pretty fast after that. We left it for a few weeks, but knew we needed to get it done quickly since there was most likely water still sitting underneath our floor. We checked out Lumber Liquidators selection and came across a few that we liked and were reasonably priced. One morning, when John was browsing, he emailed me a bamboo floor that was $1.29/sq ft. My initial instinct was that it was an amazing price! We did a bit more research on it, and a few hours later, had 800 sq ft ordered! We ordered our underlayment from Amazon and bought a floor nailer from some friends of John’s parents.
John chose the weekend that he wanted to start (which happened to be his birthday weekend, HAPPY BIRTHDAY!!) and before I packed the boys up and headed up to my sister’s house in Michigan, we had all of the old carpet up and everything moved down to the basement. You don’t realize how much stuff you can fit into two rooms until you have to move it all! I’m thinking it is yard sale time.
I asked John for a little blip about the installation process so you guys could be on the inside of what that was like. He said “it sucked.” Okie dokie then! Have fun installing your own floors, y’all! Totally kidding. But, seriously it might suck if you have to do it all alone like John did. He did have some great help that first weekend from his parents and Jose (thank you!!!); they managed to finish up all of the demo and get a good start on the floors, but after that, he was on his own. He worked on it after work and well into the evening and early morning hours. He totaled it up and said it took him over 80 hours to finish the job.
He said the toughest parts about it were the constant measuring and going to make cuts. He always thought “when I am doing this, no floor is being laid”. That’s where having 1 or 2 more people would have been beneficial because while one was measuring and cutting, the other could be laying new pieces. It was also difficult to make sure the first row was perfect so that the rest of the floor wasn’t thrown off.
He also had to join up the craft room and the hallway with one piece in order for the floor to flow seamlessly from one room to the next. This meant John needed to line both rooms up within 1/16 of an inch! Pretty crazy, but it turned out amazing!
There were also a lot of weird cuts to be made. I recall getting a few pictures of pieces like this. Pretty impressive!
Oh! And, it turns out we needed to replace some subfloor in the bathroom. We had an inkling because we couldn’t get the toilet to sit just right in there and figured there was some water damage (from the previous owners of the house). They got that all done and fixed on the first weekend so they could get to laying floor!
Underneath the laminate in the kitchen was old linoleum/quarter inch subfloor that needed to be sawed out. Also, I am told there were A MILLION staples that had to be pulled out as well. Check out this beautiful floor circa the late nineties.
Boom.
And now, we get to enjoy these amazing floors! I’m so proud of John for sticking with it! I totally would have caved and hired it out. It was a ton of work, but he said he would do it again someday as long as he had help the whole time! I recorded that so he can’t back out now.
But for real. Aren’t they beautiful??? We still have some moving back of furniture and organizing to do, but we are loving them!
The boys love them, too! Their cars go extra fast and far now 🙂
Thanks, as always, for dropping by! Now that the floors are done and my craft room is empty, I have a really good excuse to reorganize and move stuff around in there! I’m already planning how to make it more functional and can’t wait to share with y’all!
xo
Sam
