New Floors

In this episode of do it your self home improvements, the Handy Man and I challenge our kitchen floors. After months of looking at samples, we have settled on replacing our old nasty linoleum with hard wood laminate flooring. Additionally, I wanted to extend the flooring into the dinning room so that we could start eating out there as a family. It would give us a lot more room for highchairs and we wouldn't have to worry about spills.

We decided on a North Carolina Hickory.

We had to carry all 25 boxes into the house to allow them to acclimate to the temperature inside. In order to properly acclimate them, we had to open every single box. (Hope we don't get buyers remorse. There is no returning then now. )

First mission was to clear out all of the furniture.

We have a lot of crap...

Some more before shots.

Bright and early Saturday morning we started ripping out our carpet in the dinning room.

Every staple and reminiscence had to be removed and cleared.

Our Brown Eyed Girl had her pencil and hammer in hand, so we put her to work. It's a family DIY project.

In typical DIY disaster fashion, it was too presumptuous of us to think we wouldn't run into any snags along the way. Unfortunately, our sub-floors weren't exactly level. Handy Man reached for the belt sander.

The belt sander just wasn't cutting it. 


Time to call in the reinforcements!


Our in-laws to the rescue making a quick pit stop at the home improvement store for an electric planer.

What I now know about an electric planer...

1. It is a very loud machine. The pitch and constant drone of this machine is ear piercing. No, damaging to your ear drums. I am sure of it. 
2. It makes Mr Blue Eyes cry even from the protection of our bedroom while Lion King plays to muffle the sounds from the kitchen. He hates it. 
3. It creates a cloud of saw dust in no time - hence the shop vac's strategic placement.
4. It's a pretty handy little tool.
5. I never want to use one myself - too dusty and loud.

 Once the floor was leveled, we had to also strip the old linoleum in the kitchen. The first big piece came up with no issues.

Then all of a sudden...

Glue?!?

Random large spots of glue. There was no rhyme or reason when the installation process occurred. I am sure of it.

It was the strangest glue.

Still sticky after 15 years kind of glue.

Not proper linoleum glue - or so I was told.

Either way, this glue sucked - your show right off of you weren't careful kind of glue.

Once we I scraped all of the glue off as best I could. I had to paint the glue spots with KILZ to prevent it from messing with our new "floating" floor.

Once the paint dried, we were ready to start laying some floor!

Each piece of flooring was creatively engineered to snap together. For tools, we needed a rubber mallet, this special plastic brick looking thing with matching grooves to help hold and set the planks and then this other mettal do-fatzer thingy that you could use to make a whole row move if needed once it was in place. (This is why my Handy Man hates doing DIY projects with me. Pretty sure I got the Rubber Mallet name correct though.)

I am getting excited!

As you go along installing, you have to make sure to establish a pattern. Handy Man We staggered the boards in thirds and every third row you would essentially start an identical pattern placement.

Of course this makes no sense.

If you could look at my floors I could show you what I mean.

This is why I married a handy man...

Once we were making progress we noticed we were still having some issues with "soft spots" due to our imperfect floors. We found that dry wall shims (that name I know is correct) worked well to balance out the low spots.

Time was flying and we started making our transition into the kitchen.

 Notice it is dark outside!

At 7:00 pm we decided to call it a night.

Notice the color chip on the floor...

We aren't even finished and I am already dreaming about color swatches and painting.

I love painting.

He builds it. I paint it.

Good night Day One.