I am sooooooo excited about my new floors!!!! In my last post I told you about how I ripped the carpet out of my living room, honestly carpet grosses me out and I think it should never be in a house, but that is just my opinion but my opinion is usually right! Hahaha! Actually with 7 kids, 2 dogs and 5 cats I seriously think my house should have no carpet whatsoever. So, on to the good stuff!
I hummed and hawed over what to replace the carpet with. We have hardwood floors in the kitchen and hallway, and tile in the laundry and bathrooms. The hardwood floors we have are knotty alder...I seriously think that whoever decided to put these as flooring ought to be beat. Alder is a very SOFT wood. So soft in fact that I dropped a children cardboard book on it and it dented the floor. Seriously. It was ridiculous. I had a professional flooring guy come in to take a look at placing matching flooring in the living room and sanding and refinishing the rest of the hardwood floors. He said not only was alder a bad choice but it was hard to find because people started to realize that it was stupid to use it as flooring. Needless to say it would have been $4000 to fix my flooring problem.
So, then I remembered that I read a blog a year ago and she replaced her carpet with laminate flooring that I thought looked beautiful This is the one I am talking about. Plus it was going to be WAY cheaper than my $4000 option. So, I went down to Sam's Club to look at the Select Surfaces laminates and I fell in love with the Cocoa Walnut color. It is beautiful!!! I bought 24 boxes and brought them home.
It was after I bought them that I decided that I didn't just want them in my living room....I wanted them in the hallway, entry way, and dining room too. My husband was not thrilled with my idea. He is worried that with laminates and our kids it wouldn't be a good idea. You see, my littlest kids (5, 3, and 2) LOVE water and they are always dumping it on the floors. So after a debate we decided to put it in the living room, hallways, and entry way but not the dining room since it is really just an eat in kitchen and spills are always everywhere in there. We decided to put tile in the kitchen and dining room.
I proceeded to rip out all the hardwood floors in the hallway and entryway. It took me about 9 hours over the course of 3 days and lots of sweat and I was sore every morning.
I finished 1 of the hallways as well and then decided to put tile in the entryway too because water gets drug into the house all year long through the front door and tile won't get ruined by water. Laminates might. If all my kids were older I would just put laminates in the dining room, entryway, and the kitchen. I have 1 more strip of laminates to place in the other hallway but I got side tracked with Halloween and haven't finished yet.
I still have to rip out the flooring in the kitchen but that is a MUCH bigger job. I have to take out the counter tops and all the cabinets first and that means I will be without a kitchen for a few days to a week. Not sure I want to do that just yet. However it needs to be done and sooner rather than later.
On a side note I am probably going to put the laminates in all the bedrooms on the main floor too. We had to rip out the carpet in the master bedroom due to an unfortunate explosion of a LARGE container of activated charcoal and I almost have hubby convinced that laminates would be better than carpet in the bedrooms.
So to recap: (and sorry some of the pictures are a bit fuzzy)
This is what it looked like before: (this is actually the picture from before we moved in)
This is what it looked like during:
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| Getting some math skills in by figuring out the square footage of the room. |
This is what it looks like now:
I am totally in LOVE with these! Even my husband who wasn't fully on board when I bought them and started installing them has begun to like them. Also, I am completely impressed that they don't sound like laminates when we walk on them!
