Knock on wood (kinda)

This weekend we decided to come home early from out east and get an additional project finished. Wow talk about determination. We ended up getting home around midnight on Saturday night and then Sunday morning (ok it’s was really early afternoon) we got started on putting down laminate wood flooring in the Florida room aka my new office.

Here is what the floor looked like before:

The flooring was concrete, which we then primed and painted with the left over paint we had. We liked the way it looked, but the main problem was our pups. They were leaving claw marks everywhere!

So we went to IKEA and found an inexpensive fix to our problem.

We went to just to look and see what they had, but we came home with the TUNDRA click lock laminate.

I was surprised at how simple it was do. I kept asking Jon what I could do, how I could help, but I ended up just cleaning up the little bit of mess it made and finished reading The Beach House and Trail of Crumbs.

So, without further ado here are our steps for laying down the flooring.

1. First you have to clean up the floor. So a quick sweeping job and a little vacuum action and we were in business. Since we were laying it on top of concrete we had to buy a roll of plastic sheeting as a moisture barrier.

We just rolled it out and used a small razor blade to cut the excess. Pretty simple.

2. Next step is to lay down a floor liner. Which meant we had to roll it out and again use a razor blade to cut off the excess. For the floor liner you need to make sure there is no overlapping, because that would cause the flooring to not be leveled.

3. We were now finally able to open up the packages and get to work! We chose to go with the antique oak, because it had a weathered look to it and we figured it would helpful to hide any scratches that the dogs might do to it.

4. In laying down the flooring you have to do it in a subway tile format and stagger the pieces. So our table saw came in handy to trim down some pieces.

5. Then the pieces simply click and lock into place. In order to get a good fit Jon was taking a small piece of excess wood he had and butting it up to the piece of flooring he wanted to lock into place. The extra wood was there so that when he knocked in the piece into place he didn’t hit the flooring.

Gap:

Hammering:

Finished piece:

6. Since wood expands due to humidity you need to:

A. Leave the panels in the packaging for at least 48hrs in the room they are going to be laid in.

B. Leave a border around the entire room so that when the wood swells it has space to go into.

We found out that a CD case is the perfect size for the spacing that they recommend so we went around putting those in to make sure we had enough spacing.

7. Now when you are done laying down the flooring you are going to want to lay some sort of trim place to hide the spacing that you have now made. We made a quick trip to Home Depot and came back with 48 feet of trim. You need to make sure that when you are nailing it in you nail it to the wall and not the flooring.

8. Now you get to pat yourself on the back, because you did it all by yourself and you are DONE!

We are so happy with the way it came out.

It was super easy and not that pricey.

The room was 8’ x 16’ which meant we had 128’ sq ft.

Each package of flooring comes with 25.73 feet of flooring for $29.58, which means that we needed 5 packages and that came to: $ 147.90

Floor liner was: $ 24.99

Plastic Sheeting was $ 19.99

48’ of trim was .59 cents per foot, which is: $ 28.32

So the whole project came up to : $221.20 plus tax it comes to around $240 and took from around noon till 6:30/7pm to finish.

Ok so I wanted a totally relaxing weekend and didn’t truly get that. We did get to relax on Saturday and on Sunday a lot of the “We” I kept typing above we’re actually just Jon so I got a bit of relaxation in as well on Sunday along with crossing something off my to do list, which always feels fabulous.