After Ian and I decided in November to stop looking for new houses and stay in our townhouse a while longer, we also decided that we would make some much-needed (OK, more wanted than needed, but you know how that goes) home improvements. We’ve lived here for five and a half years now, and some things are starting to look a bit raggedy. Primarily the carpet.
So for our third home improvement project (the first and second were a new faucet in the downstairs half-bathroom and a new light over the kitchen sink), we decided to rip up the carpet in the living room and install laminate. Something I have been begging Ian for pretty much since we moved in. Needless to say I was ecstatic when he finally agreed.
We went back and forth for a while on whether to install the floor ourselves or pay a professional (aka Home Depot, where we bought the flooring), but we finally decided on installing it ourselves when Ian’s dad agreed to tackle the project with us.
We watched numerous how-to videos and took the Home Depot laminate class, but the project ended up being a lot more difficult—and time consuming—than we thought it would be. Because of this, I wanted to write a detailed (really detailed, aka epically long) blog entry on the experience to help shed some light on what you’re really getting into if you’re thinking about doing this yourself. And to help me remember a year from now how much work really went into the project in case I try to suggest we do the same thing upstairs.
Part 1: The materials
Quarter rounds: There were two parts to the floor installation: The laminate and the quarter rounds. Because we had carpet before we didn’t have quarter rounds, so we had to purchase new ones. If you want them to be white to match your baseboards and not the same color as the laminate (which is what we did because I think it looks better), you can buy them in the lumber section of the home improvement store. Look for the primed ones so you only have to put on one coat of paint. We got 80 linear feet (cut into 10 8-foot strips) for about $40.
Laminate: Because we decided to do the installation ourselves we could spend a little extra money on better laminate, and we went with DuPont Real Touch Elite Brazilian Cherry (note that the picture isn’t really accurate). We chose laminate over hardwood for three reasons:
- 1. It holds up better to scratches and is recommended if you have pets (hi, four cats that have claws out almost all the time)
- 2. It can be cheaper (the one we chose wasn’t a whole lot cheaper, but when you’re talking 300 square feet every cent counts)
- 3. Our house is on a concrete slab. To use real hardwood we’d either have to put down wood planks or be limited to one kind of hardwood that you wouldn’t ever be able to refinish. Oh, and an expert has to install hardwood. We wouldn’t be able to do it ourselves.
You’re supposed to buy about 10 percent more laminate than you think you’ll need because of inevitable mistakes and having to cut boards in odd sizes when you get near doors and the other end of the wall, but we ended up having to go back and buy a whole other case (making it a total of 17 cases for an almost 300 square foot room). You also are supposed to let the laminate acclimate for at least two days in the room where it will be installed, stacked either two high or, as we did, like a fort. When we realized we might not have enough on Thursday, I went back to Home Depot to buy another box. Luckily, because of some unforeseen delays, it still had almost two days to acclimate (We kind of sped up the process by placing it in the warmest room of the house, too.)
Transition kit: Depending on what kind of transitions you’re going to have (we were going from laminate to vinyl/hard surface, but the kit includes transitions for laminate to carpet, too), you’ll need a transition kit made of the same kind of laminate boards you are purchasing.
Moisture barrier: If you’re installing the floor on a concrete slab, you’ll also need to buy a moisture barrier that goes down between the slab and the laminate. It pretty much resembles huge black trash bags taped together when it’s down.
Paint: It’s not necessary to remove the baseboards when installing laminate flooring, but if you don’t match the color of the quarter rounds to the color of your baseboards it’s going to look silly (in my opinion, at least). And as we learned, there are about 2 million shades of white. I had saved the sheet of paper from when we bought the condo and selected all of our colors/appliances/etc., but when I found it, the sheet sadly and not helpfully told us “white, high gloss, no selection.” But we did notice the name of the paint supplier on the sheet. We called them up, and low and behold, Ole South has been using the same high-gloss white trim paint for 30 years in all of their houses. An hour later we had picked up a gallon from Dulux Paint Center and we were ready to go.
Part 2: The tools
One thing that occurred to me several times over the course of the project was how many tools were needed (that weren’t mentioned in any video, article or class we saw) to complete the job. You probably could do this without all of the tools we used, but it would be a lot harder and take longer. We used the following:
Saws: Table saw and laminate blade (for cutting the boards), finishing saw (for cutting the quarter rounds), jigsaw (for cutting notches out of the boards to fit around the doorway/transition into the bathroom), and a doorjamb saw (to undercut the door jambs of the bathroom door so the laminate would fit under them). Lucky for us, Ian’s dad had all of these saws already except for the table saw (which he said he was wanting to buy anyway) and the doorjamb saw (which we bought for about $12 at Home Depot).
Laminate installation kit: You can buy this at Lowe’s or Home Depot for about $15, and it contains spacers (you have to leave a quarter-inch space between the wall and the laminate, which will eventually be covered by your quarter rounds, to allow for natural expansion of the material), a tapping block (when you lock the pieces together you have to tap them to fit tightly, but you can’t tap on the material itself or you’ll ruin it) and a pull bar (for when you get to the other end of the room and can’t fit the hammer between the wall and the wood to tap).
Other tools: We also used a nail gun (for nailing in the quarter rounds after the floor was in), hammers, tape measures, carpenter’s ruler (or whatever that big L-shaped ruler thing is called), a utility knife (we dulled its first blade in about 10 minutes after using it to cut up the carpet on prep day), various sizes of paint brushes (for painting quarter rounds and their finishing nail-holes and the cracks where the pieces merge), knee pads (crawling around on concrete is no fun on the knees), a calculator (to make sure our measurements/cuts were precise), old sheets (to cover the furniture we moved into the kitchen since there was some dust flying around, but also used for painting), painter’s tape (for when we touched up the quarter rounds at the end), a sanding block, scrapers and a flat shovel (for scraping up glue left from the carpet padding and entrance hardwood section) and lots and lots of coffee. And some beer. But not a lot of beer since, as Ian said, “We’re not painters.”
Part 3: The prep work
We moved all of our living room furniture into the kitchen on Tuesday (except the chairs that wouldn’t fit so they went upstairs), and ripped up the carpet and the padding. This was the first time-consuming step where I miscalculated how long it would actually take. Besides having to pull up the carpet (which is seriously HEAVY), its tack strips and all of the freaking nails left in the floor from the tack strips, the padding was glued down around the entire edge of the room. Monday night Ian had pulled up the area of hardwood that already existed in the entrance way, but there was still a ton (I mean a SHIT TON) of glue left from that, too. We used the scrapers, shovel and sanding block to scrape up/sand down all of the glue. We did as much as we could Tuesday night and spent probably two or three hours working on it again on Wednesday.
When you put down laminate flooring (or any kind of floor, I’m assuming), it’s imperative that the surface you’re installing it on is clean, level and clear of any kind of debris. Not only could leftover glue or debris make the floor uneven, it could also inhibit the laminate from locking together properly and leave gaps in the planks.
Part 4: Laying the floor
After we got all of the old floor and debris up, took the old carpet and padding plus the bags of nails and tack strips to the dump, and thoroughly swept and vacuumed the concrete slab, we were ready to start putting down the floor. The moisture barrier goes down first—we had three sheets taped together to cover the floor, with a bit left over.
Then the laminate.
Before you lay your first row, though, you have to measure to make sure that when you get to the other side of the room you won’t be left with a space less than a few inches (I can’t remember how many inches it had to be—6 inches? 12?) wide. A piece of laminate skinnier than that would be weak, so you don’t want to get all the way to the other side and end up having to start over to avoid a weak last row.
The boards lock in on the ends and the sides, so you should lock them together on the ends first, making one long row. Tap as you go to make sure they’re tight, and then fit the entire row onto the row before it, tapping everything tightly in place after it’s locked down. If you get good-quality laminate you shouldn’t have much trouble with the tabs. I’ve read reviews that cheaper laminates have issues with tabs breaking off, making the boards unusable. It wasn’t always easy to fit the boards together, especially in tight or odd-shaped areas (just ask Ian and his dad), but everything did eventually fit together well.
You also need to be sure to stagger the rows so the joints of each row do not all meet in the middle of the floor. Not only will this look silly, but it will make your floor weak. We staggered the length of half a board each row.
The most difficult part came at the bathroom door. Not only did we have to deal with the transition from the living room to the bathroom, Ian and his dad had to use the jigsaw to cut several notches out of the board so it could fit around the door and partly into the doorway. This took a few hours, but the end result was worth it. The transitions into the bathroom and the kitchen look really, really good.
Part 5: Putting on the quarter rounds
After the floor went in, we put the quarter rounds on using a nail gun and finishing nails. Then we caulked them to make sure they looked flush with the baseboards. We would have painted over the nails and parts where the quarter rounds came together (and their ends) the next day after the caulk dried, but I forgot to bring the paint in so it froze. Luckily it was latex paint so we could let it thaw out, and it was ready to be used on Sunday.
And then we were done!! We moved our furniture back in the room on Sunday afternoon after the paint dried, and now all we have left is to hook back up all the electronics and bring the DVDs back downstairs and put them on the bookshelf.
Looking back
Now that my body isn’t sore anymore (and I did nowhere near as much physical labor as Ian and his dad), I feel like I can say I would recommend this as a DIY project instead of paying someone to install it, especially since it would have cost us somewhere between $600 and $800 for Home Depot to install it for us.
But one of the reasons I’m writing such a detailed post is because if you are going to attempt to do this, you should know what you’re getting into and what kind of a time commitment it is. We took quick breaks for lunch, ate late dinners and worked as quickly and as efficiently as we could, stopping only to confer about what the best way to tackle a particular change would be. We worked 12-hour days three days in a row, and the entire project still took us five days (one and a half days of prep, two and a half days of laminate installation and one day of finishing touches). And it would have taken longer if my father-in-law hadn’t had all of the tools that he did to make cutting the laminate and quarter rounds go as quickly as possible.
I am super proud of Ian and his dad for the job that they did, and OK, I’m proud of myself, too, even though after the prep work my role was mainly Painter, Advisor and Food/Coffee Bringer. I’m guessing that in a few months when Ian’s fingers and back have healed, he might feel like installing it ourselves was the best idea, too.
But right now, as I sit on my couch and look out across the room, I am basking in the glory of finally being an owner of a home with a sweet-ass living room floor.
> Before, during and after pictures of this project can be found on my Flickr site.
