This weekend I finished up ALL the floors.  I’m a big fan of the laminate floors now.  In probably 20-24 hours of work, I was able to get the entire upstairs done by myself.  I can also say now that I’ve put it down that I’m really, really impressed with how well the laminate coped with some of the floor issues.  There were a few places that I laid down a layer or two of felt paper to smooth a transition or to bring up a low level, but otherwise the floor and it’s pre-attached padding dealt with the rest on its own.  I was actually shocked that the area in which I had spread the leveling compound in Chloe’s room was covered without a hitch.  There is just enough “give” in this material that it could probably deal with most normal floors without much prep at all.  I recommend the felt paper as an easy-to-work-with material for building up floors where you have to, but I honestly used MUCH less than I expected to.  I’d guess that most brands are similar at any given price point, but we will definitely give a thumbs up for the Pergo Accolade.

I started working on the upstairs floors this weekend, and it’s amazing how fast these laminate floors go in.  It took awhile to get into a good groove and figure out all the tricks (the rubber mallet is your friend), but once I did they went in about 3x as fast as the engineered wood we put into the kitchen.  In about 10 hours, I was able to finish 2/3 of our upstairs (450-500 square feet, with lots of walls and cut-outs).  While I’m still not convinced I’ll like them as much as wood, the click system is awesome, and I think they will hold up well over time.

A lesson in reading directions…

On Saturday, after finishing the painting, I attempted to use leveling compound to even out some of the settling in Chloe’s room. Besides the overall slope from front to back, there was a dip along the center over the old stairwell. While the 2×4’s are strong enough for a floor, they weren’t big enough to hold the floor completely flat over the years. Knowing that the laminate floors really need a nice, flat surface, I figured that I’d better do something to improve the situation.

Believe it or not, I did actually read all the directions on the bag. Following them was a different story altogether…. mixing paddle powered by a 1/2″ drill? check! (that’s a lie, I have neither – how about hand stirring with a paint mixing stick for a few minutes?), one of those floating trowels on a long stick? Another miss, but I figured between a wallpaper scraper and some scraps of lumber I could make it work.

I was amazed at how easy it was to mix the compound by hand. While I had been expecting the tough stir of concrete, this wasn’t bad at all. My excitement ended when I started pouring it onto the floor, only to see all the lumps that had been hiding under the surface. After attacking a few with a stick and seeing them break up easily, I decided to just go for it and pour it all out. Enter problem #2. While a small area would have been easy to do with my “tools,” I wasn’t fully thinking through the logistics of what would become a 5′x8′ rectangle of goo. At first it seemed easy, as I used the high points of the floor as rails for a board that I used to push the mixture along the floor. But it was moving so much of the mixture that I started to worry about having a 2″ tall lump of it at the end of the room. So I pushed some of it back. And forth. And back. And forth. And by this time it started hardening, which made the pushes much less smooth. And did I mention that the lumps started migrating to the surface en masse, scaring me with the prospect of a rock-hard lunar surface which would guarantee the impossibility of installing the flooring? And now that it was hardening, whenever I treid to smash a lump, I’d create a divot and a surrounding donut in the floor! Although I wasn’t truly panicked, I was convinced that I’d have end up having to plywood over the room’s floor to be able to install flooring. At a certain point you realize that it’s hardened enough that you can’t work it anymore, and you just have to resign yourself to your fate. I was very happy when I checked later that night and found that while it looks very sloppy, none of it seems to be higher than the surround floor. So a few layers of felt paper might be enough to smooth out the problems. Hopefully…

The floors in this house are continuous through the entire downstairs, even into the closets. That means that you have to do all of it at once to keep it looking right, as there are no transitions between rooms.

We opted to have them refinished without a stain, because we thought that the lighter color would help offset the dark woodwork. In the end, we feel that we made the right choice.

Stephanie created a design that looked as though it could have been there since 1911. Most people are surprised when we tell them that this floor is brand new.

We used the tiles that are pre-arranged on the 12″ by 12″ sheets, but I have to say that they really didn’t work out as well as we hoped. There was a lot of slop in the manufacturing process, and MANY of the tiles were crooked or misaligned. Lots of them had to be pried off so that they could be reset in the mortar, and that created confusion while trying to set the black tiles in the spaces we had made in the white tiles. Since there were two of us working on it, we’d sometimes find that one of us had put a black tile into a space that was supposed to have a white one. There’s always a sense of panic while setting a large expanse of tile, but in the end it turned out just fine. The minor imperfections are never that noticeable once the whole room is done, and the probably subconsciously add to the the hand-done look.