Preparation From The Ground Up

After work on Friday, all the conditions were right to finally start our flooring project. After all, with our first daughter on the way this was only the first project and we needed to get moving.  I ended up leaving work a little early and spent my lunch hour at sears getting the remainder of the tools that I needed for our project.  The flooring was already acclimatizing in the office area for 72 hours.  All I needed now was a handy carpet ripper and a little reckless abandon. I just slit the carpet and padding into three sections and rolled it up and out to the curb it went. Once that  was out I used a pry bar and a mallet to pull all the carpet tack strips and anything else that construction left in the concrete.  By that time it was about 8pm and after moving all the furniture out and pulling all the other materials out it was time to call it a night.

In the morning, all that was left was the baseboards.  Since we were planning on refinishing these I had to be a little more careful pulling these out.  But with a razor knife and the aforementioned pry bar, they were really no trouble at all.  I used a hand scraper to make sure everything was relatively level and ready for underlayment.  Since the planks we bought had padding already attached to the back (a nice time-saving feature) all we had to do was install the moisture barrier and start laying planks. The planks came pre-cut into three lengths, so that made our job much easier.  The only boards I had to cut were the last pieces at the end of each row.

We quickly found out that Laura was better at installing and I was destined to be the miter saw operator.  Once we established a rhythm, things started going quick.

After only an hour of installing we were about 40% complete.  I should mention that these are click-lock flooring and since we are in Florida and on a concrete slab, we are floating the floor (no glue, no nails, no mess).  We really started laying planks at around 1pm, and by 4:30 with a hour lunch break in there were to the other wall and starting in on last couple rows with all the fun miter cuts.  No more straight edges for me.  Everything was chop the end to match the previous plank lengths, add a 45 degree angle and then every once in while hand cut a little triangle middle to accommodate for doorways and such.  By despite all that we were laying the last plank at around 5:00pm.


After a short retrospective we decided to power through and just finish everything we could that night so we could relax on Sunday.  So we pulled the re-finished baseboards out of the garage and starting installing them with the little 3 gallon air compressor and air nailer I just got.  I'll never go back to hammer and nails.  I think we had all the baseboards installed in less than ten minutes with only tiny nail holes to paint over.  We didn't have any quarter round before because there was carpet in the room, so technically we still have to do that to be finished but that should only take a half hour or so.  We moved most of the furniture back into the room and were recouping on the couch by 8pm. Below are the results!  I'll take better pictures when we finally get setup in here again. But I have been getting before and after requests, so here they are!

Before

After

Thanks for Reading!
~Nathan (and Laura)