The floors have been finished and we are enjoying them! No more nasty carpet and now everything is back in place again! We finished this project pretty quickly because having your life in disarray from home improvement sucks big time. Especially when it is your entire downstairs and you work from home. We just did a little bit each day to keep things moving.
First off, the laminate flooring itself was from Lowe’s. It is called Winchester Oak and it was only 68 cents per square foot. While we would have loved hardwood floors, there were a couple reasons why we didn’t go with that. The expense, for one. In our neighborhood and the price of real estate, the cost of hardwood floors would not give us the return that we would need to put them in. Now in our house that we plan to live in for a very, very long time – yes, hardwoods will happen, but not here. The other reason is our uneven floors. With a 100+ year old house, there is a lot of settling that goes on and the floors have some bumps and bulges in them that only a complete subfloor replacement would solve. Not going to happen. The more inexpensive laminate actually has some give to it to work along those bumps, along with some strategically placed extra underlayment. Of course, this breaks all rules of laying flooring, but we are rule breakers…
Bye-bye old carpet:
Ta Da!!
Dining room:
Office:
Kitchen through to living room:
The thing I really love is that we were able to do the room with no transitions between the rooms because of the layout of the doorways. There is a maximum they recommend without using transitions and we were under that. It makes the rooms much more spacious.
The only room we didn’t remove the baseboards in was the office. These are big solid baseboards and we were afraid we would wreck the plaster walls. You can see the gap here between the flooring and the baseboards. This gap is necessary for expansion and contraction of the flooring.
The solution? Quarter round shoe molding! They think of everything in the world of home improvement.
Pixie seems to really enjoy the floors for playing. You can see her in the background as a blur scooting a paper ball.
The floors aren’t perfect. There are a couple spots where there is a tiny gap, which I think is from just the cheapness of the flooring (being honest here). Just enough to catch a fingernail on, but you don’t notice it unless you stick your nose down there – like it was when putting in the floor 
.
Also some corner issues.
We undercut the molding, but it is hard to cut the laminate pieces to fit exactly, plus you don’t want them to be really snug for expansion purposes. We will patch these spots.
You have already seen the living room:
Total cost for the project included all of the flooring, the underlayment, 2 saw blades, transition pieces for the kitchen and the shoe molding for the office – $686. We already had paint and were able to save all of the baseboards and repaint them. Plus we had the little toolkit from doing the laminate upstairs. We should get a big ROI on this project!
It took around 4 weeks to finish, which isn’t all that bad! And I love, love, love the floors. I don’t know if I will ever get tired of saying I love the floors, even though John may get tired of me saying that!
Between the new driveway, the repainted front porch, and the new floors with rearranging the living room, it’s like we moved into a new house!
Today’s pink item:
The floors look stunning! Great job guys. Now kick back and relax. 🙂
Thanks – we are relaxing! 😀
I’m impressed – looks great!
Thanks!
Great job on the floors. I was thinking about you this weekend as we replaced our kitchen floor in our camp with bamboo flooring. It looks very similar to yours. Thought it would only take a couple of hours but ended up an all day project. We love our new floor too.
I would love bamboo flooring! That is for our dream house 😀
Pretty color stain, so light and airy feeling!
Your floors look amazing!! Of course Pixie is the star 🙂
The new floors look great and your house looks bigger! I’ve been talking them up to Jeff…thinking about replacing everything with what you did, except for the bathrooms. Good to hear it wasn’t insanely expensive, too. So…how about a trip to Texas to advise on the install? You can bike here during the winter! 🙂 🙂 🙂
In our old house, there was laminate in the bathroom and it wasn’t bad, actually. I prefer tile, but you can do it. Laminate can really vary in price and surprisingly, we actually preferred the less expensive one. Normally it is the opposite 😀
I’ll come out if you fly me (and my bike) out there to do your floors!
I love the look of the new floors. It does make the rooms look bigger! You two do amazing work. I’m very impressed.
I love it, it definitely looks like a new house. Much more fresh than the carpet. Job well done Lori and John.
And I love it how Pixie is sitting in the only spot with sunshine. Bella does that too and I always think it’s funny to see that cats and dogs do that.
Beautiful! As you know I have an almost 100 year old house too but mine does have hardwoods. Not sure if they’re original although I am sure they’ve been refinished a time or too. Just based on photos, your floors look as good as my ‘real’ hardwoods. So glad you’re enjoying them. Nice to do a job like that and actually enjoy the end result!
You guys are amazing!!!!!!!!!!! LOVE the new look. How cool to be living in “a new home” ! 😉 Beautiful! I guess Pixie is happy??? 🙂
High five
Love the look!
I’m in the same boat with respect to ROI. Anything I do now falls under “quality of life” rather than potential value of resale, especially considering that I don’t plan to resell for a long time. Who knows what will be the “in” thing at that time. Probably hovercraft floors. 🙂
It looks like one of those big reveals on a TV home improvement show. I absolutely adore those floors! One day, I want to rip out all the flooring in the house and re-carpet some areas and have some done in wood. I’m thinking I’d still carpet the upstairs bedrooms and family room, but I’d love the kitchen, dining room, front entryway, hallways, and even the living room to be wood. What a project that would be though, and we’re not that handy!!
Amazing transformation! Makes me want to pull up all my carpet. Have you ever considered turning your piano around? Just a thought. 😉
The floors look AMAZING!! I’m shocked that it was so cheap. It makes me want to do the same thing 🙂
The new floors look FANTASTIC Lori!!!!! You and John are talented!!! LOVE that Pixie is plopped in the sun beam! She’s such a cutie. Have a wonderful Tuesday.
Your floors look wonderful! Will you show your patches when you are done? We put laminate in our family room, it’s from Costco but same color as yours. We have some really tough spots by our huge Brady bunch style fireplace. We have steps down from the kitchen that were a pain to do too. Lots of patching:)
The floor looks so nice. Great job, Lori.
I love the fact that the floors run seamlessly into the next room! Looks totally professional!!
You guys did a great job, i’m impressed and envious 🙂
LOVE THE FLOORS.
now when we all be coming over to break em in? 😉
Love, love, love! We put down hardwood in our family recently and it has made such a huge difference.
I love how the rooms flow into one another. Our house was built in 1922, which used to be a cabin on the river, but has since been added on so its a single family – albiet still small 1200 sf. But the living room is in the front of the house and the kitchen is in the very back. I have a den off my kitchen and sometimes ask Tony to come sit back there to keep me company when I cook – there’s a t.v. there too!
LOVE your hardwood floors and the $$ was amazing!
Looks very nice!
Love it! My husband works for a small flooring/ceiling/paneling store here on LI, so we get our stuff at cost, yet we STILL have floors to do!