April 2006
It happens to everyone - the carpet that once looked new gets more and more worn out and embarassing. So what's a guy to do? Replace it with do-it-yourself Laminate Flooring! Jaime and I had seen the TV commercials and the in-store displays showing how easy it is to install this stuff yourself. Could it really work as shown?
We tore up all the old carpet, exposing a thin rubber-ish pad in the living room. The subflooring looked fine except for some water stains leading away from the front door. In a house built in the late 1960s its hard to tell exactly what might have happened in the past to cause this. The floor wasn't rotted so we proceeded to sweep up and start laying the laminate down. We chose a beech color and went with a DuPont 30-year warranty grade of Laminate. The good thing about this is that the padding is built into the back of each plank, saving us a step in the installation.The living room went very cleanly which isn't surprising given that it is just one giant rectangle. The only tricky part was sawing the hole for the floor air vent. I don't have a jigsaw yet so I used the circular saw, holding the guard back while I "backed" the blade down into the wood. While I realize this isn't the safest way to do things but it worked a-okay!
The next room was the dining room. What we found here defies explanation. One of the previous occupants of this house replaced the carpet but left the original 1968 carpet underneath. Underneath this original carpet was the original padding which had turned into carcinogenic dust and glue. Removing this gooey, dusty padding required the use of putty knives and a full day of backbreaking labor. The original carpet was an incredibly busy design quite typical of the time I think - brown, yellow and gold with diamonds and swirls. See the picture below. Amazing, isn't it?.
We also found water damage here and it was unfortunately more substantial than in the living room. The back of the dining room connects to the sunroom, an addition probably dating from the mid or late 1980s. Before this sunroom was here there was a sliding glass door exiting to the backyard. Anytime rain would blow against the back side of the house it would work its way inside around the sliding glass door and soak the subflooring. When we removed the carpet we found two water-damaged areas measuring about 4 inches by 6 inches on either side of the doorway. After chiseling the bad wood out, I repaired it with a combination of wood blocks and lots of high-strength wood putty. As long as the sunroom remains there no water should ever get to it again.
The dining room floor installation went well since it's a fairly regular rectangle like the living room. The hallway was much more difficult with doorways and doorfacings every few feet, and a 90 left turn at the end of the hallway leading to a closet. For the kitchen we chose a marble colored laminate made by Pergo. This contrasted nicely with the beech color in the dining room, and the white of the marble worked well with the white countertops and backsplash. This area also was easy to install after getting the refrigerator moved out of the way.
So if you're asking yourself "Can I install laminate flooring myself?" I'd have to say you need to access your handyman skills first. Can you handle a power saw? Can you measure precisely and visualize how to manipulate objects into tight spaces? The wood planks snap into each other from one direction only, and planning how to get these planks into place can be harder than you'd first think.