After making the decision to take our home off the market, Caren and I decided to do some upgrades to ye olde house. First order of business: floors.
We went with the laminate throughout the entire downstairs because it will allow us to make our cheat our kitchen a little bigger which, in turn, will allow for a larger dining room table. A must-have for a growing family.
Here are a few before/after shots. We don’t have everything quite put back together (we’re still sans-baseboards and some trim) but we’re making progress!
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Living Room – before
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Living Room – before
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Living Room – after
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Living Room – after
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Kitchen – before
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Kitchen – Cupboards painted
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Kitchen – Flooring done
A note: the rest of the post goes into details of the install. If you’d rather spare yourself from reading about the agony of installing engineered flooring, stop here. On the other hand, I throw in some humorous antidotes, so it might be worth your while. That, and if you forward this to seven friends in the next half hour Bill Gates will give you $1,000. Seriously.)
The process was, in theory, pretty straight forward. All the videos we watched basically distilled the process down to a few “easy” steps that made it look like we’d be done by dinner time. “First, prep the flooring. Second, lay the boards—make sure they click. Third, install the trim. Fourth, celebrate your new floor!”
I think intentionally simplify it to sucker you into an impossible project you have no idea how to do. This in order to get you to buy all the stuff from them in order to do it. Lowes needs to change their “Let’s build something together” tagline to “It’s all you, sucker—where’s our money?”
A little tangent here. I’ve always been big-box-home-improvement-store agnostic. But, just for the record, Home Depot knocks the socks off of Lowes. We would have avoided the L word all together except they gave us a screaming deal on the actual flooring. Every time I go there I swear that only two people are actually working and both are on smoke break. The store is like one big rat maze and when I actually went to pick up the 35 boxes of Pergo I ended up only coming home with 24. (Let’s skip the part where I should have counted before leaving the store, shall we? When you get a huge pile of flooring from a Lowes worker 24 could look, at a glance, like 35…right?) On the other hand the HD folks are almost always available, know their schmack, and the store is easy to navigate. It’s Home Depot for me from here on out. Go big Orange!
Ok, back on track.
The stars aligned and my work schedule allowed me to breathe for a few days at the same time that Springville sponsored a Spring Cleaning day wherein the city provided a huge dumpster for the neighborhood to use. (Get it? Springville, Spring Cleaning… oh, never mind.)
I couldn’t pass up the opportunity to chuck all my carpet for free, now could I? Thus the saga begins. We bought all our tools and flooring in a rush to have what we needed when we started.
Day One: Move furniture out into garage, tear up carpet, remove baseboards
Let’s just say, that despite our efforts to keep our house spit-spot, this carpet was beyond disgusting. Let it be written that I will never, no never, buy bottom-of-the-rung carpet. Yuck. Baseboards proved to be a fairly easy project once I figured out how to remove them without breaking or damaging them. Baseboard causalities were limited to only 2-3 boards which I lovingly glued back together.
Day Two: Wait around for the Pergo to acclimate to our home, go shopping for random crap, also throw in a haircut for good measure
The boards are required to live in the room they’ll be installed in for at least 48 hours before installing. I guess this helps them get comfortable with their surroundings before they commit to being walked on for 10 years. Either that or humidity played a factor. Who knows?
We spend the morning doing the last of the prep work which included putting down underlayment to make the formally carpeted areas the same height as our linoleum. Much sawing and drilling ensued. Also,the kids broke out the crayons for a free-for-all on the soon-to-be-covered underlayment.
Before we went to the store for some last-minute items we did some quick hair cuts and Mathias got his first buzz cut—his little 10 month-old head was kind of wispy, bless him.
Around 4 pm we finally got around to laying the first of the actual flooring. The first row was a little arduous. The tutorials seem to gloss over how to square the first row. Sure it should be simple enough, but it doesn’t take more than a fraction of an inch to really throw things off at the end of the job. We got a few pieces in place before running into our sliding glass door.
The procedure for doors was to cut off the door jam with a saw and install the flooring underneath before moving onto the transition areas. I sliced some linoleum and discovered my underlayment was rotten all the way down to the floorboards. Over the next hour I removed all the rotting pieces, smashed some now-homeless bugs, chiseled out the rotten floor, double-checked the crawl-space to make sure it hadn’t gone all the way through, and reinstalled everything. Then I calked the living schmack out of it to ensure it doesn’t ever, ever leak again. You can now bathe there without ruining the floor. If you’re into bathing in the kitchen, that is.
Around 10pm we closed up shop because we thought it a little rude to be running a table saw in our backyard any later than that.
Day Three: A Whole Lot of Flooring Going On
What’s nice about flooring is that when you have an open room you can really make progress. It’s those stinking tight areas that throw off your timeline. More on that later.
And we did lay it pretty quickly. Within two hours we had a major part of the room covered. Caren headed to an appointment and I pressed forward alone.
I truly believed that I would be doing most of the project myself. Not that I didn’t think her capable, but based on past experience I end up doing a lot of this type of work myself with her helping only when I absolutely need her. For the record, not only did she prove to be a tremendous help, but there’s no way I could have done it without her. I got most of under the fridge done during her first appointment and got stuck while working under the dishwasher during her second appointment later that day.
I was frustrated and stuck. She came home and did things with a measuring tape that mere mortals can’t comprehend. From then on out it was her measuring and marking and me sawing and cutting. We were like Bonnie & Clyde, peanut butter & jelly, bubbles and bath water. Or something. Suffice it to say: she rocks.
After many more hours we had pretty much all of the living room and dining room done. With only the laundry room, two closets, and a bathroom remaining, we felt we could polish off the job, add our trim and replace our baseboards the last day and have a finished house by Sunday.
Ha.
Day Four: Holy Cutting Batman.
Saturday was, by far, the worst of the days. Those last few areas were so cut-up that we measured and cut pieces several times before getting them to work correctly. The trap door (to the crawl space) took eight (8!!!) hours. The laundry room took at least four. The two older kids took advantage to become Goonies in the crawl-space. They later reported seeing something scary that “looked like an old man.” Which reminds me, I ought to double check that we don’t have a homeless man down there.
Around 9pm I removed the toilet. I didn’t know where to put it, so I just left it on the front porch. And why not? Not a lot of people would see it—it was only for a few hours, right? Then I started thinking of some punk kids seeing my pot on the porch and swiping it just to be funny. So I moved it into the garage lest I spend an hour picking shards of porcelain off my driveway.
Oh, by the way, here’s a tip to keep your toilet removing experience as pleasant as a toilet removing experience can be. Dump a couple of cups of bleach into the tank, flush. Wait a half hour then flush another couple cups down. Then proceed to remove your throne. I was expecting vile nasty smells to be a constant companion, but instead I ended up breathing the comparably sweet scent of Clorox. Mmmm, bleach….
By the time our self-imposed 10pm no-sawing curfew settled upon us, we still had the entire entry-way, bathroom, and our second closet to finish. At 11:30pm I packed up my saw, apologized under my breath to the neighbors, covered the furniture in the garage, and set up shop inside in order to continue.
Often times, as I stood there sawing away in the wee hours of the morning, I wondered what I was thinking operating a dangerous saw in my delirious state. “It’s 2 o’clock in the morning, do you know where your thumb is? Yeah, it’s sitting there on the garage floor while I spurt blood all over myself. *Giggle, giggle, zzzz..”
Fortunately I kept all my digits.
At 2:30 we laid our last plank, shut down the spinning blade of death, showered, and crawled into bed, completely fried, sometime around 3:30am.
Sunday went by in a blur of exhaustion. We started moving furniture in and cleaning up the garage on Monday and now are finally feeling like we can see the light at the end of the tunnel.
Almost a week later we still haven’t finished the trim work or baseboards. I put a bunch of them on this morning and Caren is working on the rest this afternoon. It’s slowing going now that we can’t dedicate all our time to it, but should be finished by this weekend. I have major soreness in my hands—I think as a result nerve damage from the vibration from the saw, but I don’t know—it might have been from smacking my head in frustration so many times.
All-in-all it was an good experience, and I’m glad we’re done. It’s always sad to see some of our older pieces of furniture moved onto a beautiful new floor—it makes me want to chuck our entertainment center in particular. We’ll get a table in the next few months and have a whole new living arrangement!
Now we just need to get some new carpet upstairs…
