New Floors for Thanksgiving

Now if you haven't guessed it by now, we have a little bit of crazy in our family. We were expecting 11 people and 3 dogs to our 4 people, 2 dog house for Thanksgiving. On the Friday before Thanksgiving I told my husband how Lumber Liquidators was having an awesome sale. The wind was blowing in the right direction because the day ended with us coming home with new flooring for the Dining Room. I mentioned the 2 dogs, you've seen them before. They're not small. We got a 3/4 inch engineered handscraped golden teak. This is hard stuff and will hold up to our big pets. My husband did alot of the initial removing of the old carpet and pad. Below you see the blue padand the old carpet. It was old and raising dogs from puppies, yep, and few accidents happened in that room.

 

It was a long night to get up all the staples, sweep up all the dust and debris. But on the plus side the floor is relatively level so we could move forward. I removed the baseboards as I wanted to reuse them.

 

 

 

The particular flooring we laid is a floating floor. No nailing required! Just click it together. The pad is attached to the back of it. No need to lay anything over the subfloor. 

 

 

By Sunday night the floor looked like the above picture. I can honestly say I did most of the work myself after the hubby got the old carpet up and out. I used a miter saw to cut pieces as needed. You want to lay the floor so your seams don't line up and pieces around the walls can't be any shorter than 12 inches or so. Now was the time I started working on that baseboard. I took the old off and as I did this I numbered the pieces so I knew where they all went.

 

 

 I also bought new quarter round, stained both the baseboard and quarter round. This took longer than I thought to dry so the whole project slowed to practically a halt. The stain was not drying fast enough. Plus I wanted to put 3 coats of polyurethane over that.  So needless to say Thanksgiving came and went with new floor but no baseboards. It still looked awesome.

 

 

 

I did finally get the baseboard and quarter round on after all the family had left. I just love the floor. I'm thinking since this is the second room we've put this flooring in that a third is in the future! If you want to lay a new floor yourself and have questions, let me know.

 

Linda