Slick 60's

(This takes place starting before the threat of government shutdown concerns- so bear with me here).

A month ago, I spent about $2,000 to do the floors in my house. When I bought my house in April, the carpets looked okay, though you could tell they were old.
As the summer went on, the smell became impossible to deal with. My dogs only had a few accidents, but those areas had been treated and cleaned. The smell throughout the house just seemed to be worse as the heat and humidity hit. I had it, had some money saved up to do this knowing I am potentially needing to move again in the summer and would have to rent this house out.
I did a lot of research on carpet, laminate flooring, vinyl plank etc. carpet too expensive. Laminate was cheaper but not durable. I settled on Lifeproof luxury vinyl plank flooring from Home Depot. Put in my first order of 800sqft for the main living areas.

Knowing I wouldn’t have any students and college class was over, I could dedicate my time to the flooring project without rushing.

Of course the day I started, it snowed.


Started removing the old carpet and linoleum





After removing all the old stuff, checking slab level, and doing some cleaning, I payed some planks out to determine how I would run the length. The material doesn’t need acclimation time but it sat in my house for several days before I actually did anything with it.


I will post some more photos. The living room, kitchen and hallway are all done now. Took me about a week at night and a few weekend days to do the work. I moved furniture around as I was progressing. Took a week off of this project due to babysitting two other dogs. The flooring is waterproof, scratch resistant (dogs nails didn’t damage it), but it I still slippery under their feet.

Hold on there Home Depot! I’m not sure I can afford this sort of tool commitment for a weekend project!

Did undercutting of my baseboards due to it being way more work to remove them from the walls. They only needed to be trimmed a little.


Working on installing the floor, I had maybe 7 lengths installed when whamo- I smacked my finger with a dead blow hammer against the tapping block and started seeing tweety birds and bursting stars.

After all the blood stopped pouring, this is the damage I did.
It’s been two weeks and that booger picker still hurts and peeling.





Closet


In order to line up the hallway into my kitchen without doing a transition, I measured and practice lay a lot. Drew this marker line to keep lined up.


Due to all that prep work, everything lined up.








So after all said and done



I ordered $1600 more to do the bedrooms as soon a second I saw this came out so well. I took a chance and spent my money. As you know I got mad and scared when the threat of no pay for work happened. It’s cause I spent some money I saved. Dumb dumb here but it happened.

I am moving on to the bedrooms now. Those bedroom carpets look like a bloody murder scene may have happened in there’s.
Previous owner was here for 10 years. Next door told me that the carpet was installed years before he owned it, maybe 14 years ago.
Previous owner did t have kids or pets, but dang it’s like a kid or pet stood in the middle of the closets, and bedrooms and just peed everywhere. The bedrooms my dogs aren’t allowed in, yet they smell like pee so bad.

Onward to the next phase.

Spending money on tools you use
Or money spent on your home , increasing its value
Are good investments

My sister did some of her home years ago
We did the office in this house also
It all is standing up well & looks good

That looks great April, well done !

We bought enough Laminate to do our house years ago, then found out that due to not having base boards
the edges would need some quad put over them, and Lyn doesn't want that, so we are going to change to Vinyl Plank
just need to agree on a colour maybe this year as it's only 1/1/19

that looks nice. you'll be glad you went with the vinyl planks instead of the pressed wood. my basement flooded when i was at slick stock this year and i replaced it , the laminate floor, with vinyl. love it. are you putting down the under layment it calls for? just curious. makes it feel kinda scwooshy(?) when you walk on it but i think its supposed to help with the floating part of a floating floor. looks nice and i think you'll be happy with it. Jeff

pikupmn wrote:that looks nice. you'll be glad you went with the vinyl planks instead of the pressed wood. my basement flooded when i was at slick stock this year and i replaced it , the laminate floor, with vinyl. love it. are you putting down the under layment it calls for? just curious. makes it feel kinda scwooshy(?) when you walk on it but i think its supposed to help with the floating part of a floating floor. looks nice and i think you'll be happy with it. Jeff

no. It’s already attached to the plank and any extra padding or underlayment voids the warranty.

Spent more time than I anticipated for today working on this project.
I worked on the two small bedrooms, with ignition to do the main hall bathroom tomorrow.

Here it is.

Before




Oh my god this smelled so bad.




Spare bedroom done.


Now moving on to the office/junk room







WIll move master bedroom into this room in order to complete that flooring part.

More to go. Back is sore. Knees are bruised from this work, and my hands are swollen and numb.

Happy new year all. I’m off to bed because I don’t celebrate the New Years. Actually, I have rarely ever stayed up to observe it. Most of the last 20 years I was sleeping as the calendar shifts.

Stay safe,

Nice work! I know from experience how much effort it can take to get the transitions to line up, particularly when walls aren't 100% true and square.

shipwrecked wrote:

pikupmn wrote:that looks nice. you'll be glad you went with the vinyl planks instead of the pressed wood. my basement flooded when i was at slick stock this year and i replaced it , the laminate floor, with vinyl. love it. are you putting down the under layment it calls for? just curious. makes it feel kinda scwooshy(?) when you walk on it but i think its supposed to help with the floating part of a floating floor. looks nice and i think you'll be happy with it. Jeff

no. It’s already attached to the plank and any extra padding or underlayment voids the warranty.

Our previous house also had laminate in the basement, sitting directly on the slab with only the light foam underlay and no vapour barrier. The humidifier line popped loose one morning and flooded the furnace room and fortunately I got to it pretty quick, but not before water wicked underneath the laminate all the way to the opposite corner of the basement. So that got ripped up immediately and eventually replaced with the same type of product as you used. It was similar in that it called for no underlay, since the locking tabs were quite fragile if not laying flat on a hard surface.

It pissed me off that we had to redo the basement because it set us back on our upstairs reno, but it was a much better product in the end. I liked that it was 100% vinyl with no organic material whatsoever, so if it did flood again it could be pulled up, dried off and reinstalled whereas the laminate is just junk afterwards. And it was immune to cat puke, claw scratches, etc. In my mind if you're going to spend the time to DIY a floor you might as well leverage the labour savings into the best product you can afford.

I had the opposite baseboard problem as you though, where the vinyl was thinner than the laminate and the end gaps were bigger so I actually had to lower the existing baseboards. The stuff did hold up well other than a chip in an unprotected edge which I was able to fix by gluing in a small patch from a scrap piece, and was only there because I hadn't installed a transition to the bare concrete in the furnace room. My only complaint was that it was hard to find matching transition pieces after the fact (we didn't fully complete the floor until just before listing the house) so if I had it to do over I'd be sure to buy the transitions with the flooring at the same time in case the colour gets discontinued or something.

slick4x4 wrote:Spending money on tools you use
Or money spent on your home , increasing its value
Are good investments

Agreed, and even if it doesn't add significant value to do a reno it can still make your house sell quicker which is still a huge advantage. I will say that our house was on the market a long time before we bought it, but sold on the first day with multiple offers even though it was technically only a one-bedroom (huge master with a smaller second upstairs bedroom that was converted to an office with an open archway). So it was actually at a bit of a sales disadvantage by conventional thinking. In hindsight it was a lot more work than we intended but it worked out really well for us.

Did more work in the house. Two bathrooms done.

Glad I did this. The inners were probably vintage 1991 when the house was built. The wax ring in one had a slight leak under the toilet. The inners disintegrated upon touching and I probably had little time before a catastrophic plumbing issue would have happened.













One closet left. Trim around baseboards and move on to the next thing.