The main floor of the house--since we've moved in--has three types of flooring. The living room and dining room with one kind of laminate. The kitchen and hallway with another laminate. And the Family room with carpet. Overall it does not make the house uniform or flow evenly.
Well, we're about to change all that.
(Editors Note: technically there is also the floor of the powder room, which in a past blog we showed it being re-tiled, and the laundry room, which is a future tiling project to come...so it is not the entire main floor but more like 90% of it)
We really enjoy the living/dinning room flooring, so the goal is to place it throughout the remainder of the main floor. Otherwise we would be forced to replace everything.
We didn't have anything to go on but a SKU#, but after many calls to stores, Kel finally found it. Of course she did. And of course that meant the project is instantly Green-lit.
So this project is going to consist of ripping out the laminate flooring in the Kitchen, Hallway, and the carpet in the Family Room, and replace it with the same type of laminate in that is in the Living /Dining Room.
Before we move forward....here are the before pictures.
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| Family Room (aka Pita's Apartment) |
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| Hallway into the Kitchen |
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| Hallway leading into the Family Room |
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| Kitchen |
Alrighty then, let's get started.
DAY 1: Demolition Derby
Step 1) remove the quarter round from around the hallway and kitchen walls. Would have been a real simple task if not for the GIANT nails holding the wood in. They were massive and difficult to pull out. What should have been an hour task was 3 1/2 hours. Further, I was trying to salvage as many of pieces as possible so I wouldn't have to redo it all. But in the end, the nails proved too stubborn and much of the wood simply splintered.
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| Disproportionate nail to wood thickness |
Step 2) Next it was time to remove the existing laminate. That is the easy part, just lift it up and out as fast as possible.
Ok...now that the laminate is up, we can see what exactly is going on underneath.
And its not good.
The idea is that we want to continue from Living/Dining Room straight through to the kitchen. But it appears that the kitchen floor is raised higher. Oh, oh.
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| This is the transition piece that was used to bridge the gap (a wood ramp sits on top of that) |
Lifting up the laminate underpad revealed the culprit.
Yes. The previous owners had vinyl tiled over it. Not once, but twice. And the vinyl was sitting on a backing board attached to the subfloor.
I started thinking that I could lift the vinyl to get at the screws to take up the backing board, but lifting two layers of vinyl was just beyond difficult.
So it was time for the brute force approach.
Step 3) Pry the unwanted backing board away from the sub floor.
Um...ya. Easier said then done.
They had used not only screws to attach the board, but also staples...lots of staples. And then for good measure they added some more staples.
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| Reaching under the board...and this is what I was grabbing |
So it was slow and steady. Pry, lift, get punctured by staples. Pry, lift, get punctured some more. Have I mentioned getting punctured by staples? Well I did, a lot!
The wood so much as didn't get separated off the floor, as it was violently ripped asunder, chunk by frustrating chunk. Thankfully I've been blessed with an abundance of powerful muscles and this was the opposite of a problem. #fibbinginmyblog
However, once it was all up, there were still a lot of screws and staples embedded in the floor. They were sticking up just enough to be a pain, and were too big to hammer flush.
Step 4) So now it was time to rip all the staples out. I tried prying them up, but that wasn't going anywhere. The best way was to use a hook screwdriver and pull.
So how many staples had to be yanked out by hand? 629 staples.
There were 113 screws to remove too, but thank goodness for the power screwdriver.
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| 629 staples - 113 screws |
At least the kitchen floor is now demoed.
DAY 2: Demolition...the softer side.
If any part of demolition can be considered a prance-in-the-park...its carpet removal.
Time for this pee stained eye sore to go. (to be clear, it was the dog peeing on it when she had Pancreatitis not Kel or myself).
Easy. Lift and cut easy to roll sections (kudos to my Dad for teaching me the loop knot, as I haven't used it since I had to tie newspapers up on garbage day...but it helped in tying up the carpet rolls). Did the same for the underpad. And pried up the carpet tack border.
And in only a couple hours, the Family room is ready to go.
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| Not sure what those stains are. I don't think Pita could pee that much in her lifetime. |
Well, Day 3 is about to begin and let's hope it is an easy install. Ha! Ha! Ha! (I make myself laugh).
And finally, an update from Pita:
K&K
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