Pandemic quarantine means time to work on the house. I’ve been hating on our nasty vinyl floors for years, and they’d only gotten nastier after years of renters in the house. But I couldn’t figure out what to replace them with. Tile was too heavy for the creaky floor and would likely crack with time. Hardwoods were expensive and hard to match to our existing floors. I didn’t want “wood-look” laminate up against the real hardwood floors in the adjacent rooms.
I finally landed on this laminate floating floor, one of the few I could find that looked like tile (not fake wood) and was relatively neutral. I ordered it based ONLY on the pictures on the site, which was a pretty BOLD MOVE for this gal. Tony went to pick it up at the store and it was beautiful!
This is tha stuff.
This was a “one-day project” according to Tony, but it actually took from Monday-Thursday. There were a lot of steps involved, most of which I did not take part in because I was attempting to “work from home” whilst Tony and Scottie sawed and beat hammers on stuff.
First up, we had to remove the quarter-round molding from all of the baseboards, because you need the floor have about 1/4 to 1/2″ gap from baseboards all the way around so it can expand and contract with temperature and humidity changes. I did some of that. Tony and Scottie then reinforced and leveled one section of the floor, and rolled out this underlayment to help make the floor as quiet as possible.
From there, much cutting, cussing, bickering, and noise ensued. I stayed out of the way. I learned that Scottie makes a “beep bop boop” robot sound when making mental calculations and that both of them enjoy measuring twice AND cutting twice. The most difficult part of this floor seemed to be getting the edge pieces to fit properly and there was much ado about that. At the end of the day, as always, the Tony/Scottie power-team did an amazing job.
Once the click-lock floor was in place, they made some custom-routed molding to replace the old quarter-round we’d removed. It looks really nice and better matches the original molding in the rest of the house.
There’s much more to do in this room, but for now, this floor is making a HUGE difference. I wasn’t sure what to make of these floating floors prior to working with one, but I’m really happy with the way it looks and feels, and the price was right, too!
For the record, we purchased both the flooring and the underlayment from Lumber Liquidators; it was delivered to our local store within 3-4 days, and we were able to go pick it up.
T&A Fix It Up 