more of the floor: fake wood

Our new carpet went in all of the rooms that were carpeted before we moved in except for the front living room. We decided that we wanted to go for a wood look in that area. Installing an actual wood floor was not in the budget so we decided on laminate flooring. After searching the internet, Lowe's, Home Depot, and Lumber Liquidators we settled on a floor that we both liked. We went with a Hand Scraped Hickory by SwiftLock that we found at Lowe's. After some MAJOR DEMO of the existing tile entry (there were multiple layers of flooring from the 25 years the house has been alive - I'm talking hundreds of staples in the floor, people!) we got to practice some geometry to get our measurements and set out to buy our floor.

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When we got to Lowe's we looked around for a flatbed and made our way to the back of the store to load up 16 boxes of the flooring. Surprised to hear that no one bothered to help us with this process? Me neither!

Truth be told, the installation process really isn't that difficult. We used a jigsaw and learned some tricks along the way, like the fact that painters tape helps protect the board during the cutting process. This project, like every other one we've taken on, takes longer than expected. Craig worked on the installation for three days over a long weekend. Once the floor was installed we had to paint the baseboards for installation. We opted to reuse our baseboards to save money since it would add up quickly replacing the baseboards throughout the house.

In the end we are very happy with the outcome and thoroughly enjoy our fake wooden floor!

Sorry for the poor photo quality. These are all from Craig's phone or on a day with bad lighting.


P.S.. We recently looked into the cost of continuing the floor through out the main level into the kitchen. Sadly, we discovered that floor is no longer being made. I guess we will be tiling the kitchen at some point down the line. For now we are content to live with our dirty, cracked tile floor!