When we were shopping for our current home, and looking at houses from dirty fixer-uppers to recently updated nicer homes, one thing I was hopeful we'd get was a chance to redo the floors.
It's crazy, and it sounds like a lot of work, but I really wanted to be able to give our new home consistent floors throughout. I am not a fan of carpet and really wanted to do click hardwood or laminate in every room! (Unless we ended up with a home with original hardwoods.) Well, lucky for me, the
#Stanley90sreno needed new floors
everywhere, and I got my chance.
We installed 1,574 SF of
Select Surfaces click laminate flooring by ourselves in this home--sharing how and why in this post!!
Jason and I had installed laminate flooring in my parents' rental units twice before. Different brands and rooms, but both products from the big box store. One had an underlayment attached; the other didn't. Both times were small rooms, which took a while, but got faster as we went on. We learned it was definitely doable, but hard work. We looked at the cost of installation and it's usually about $2-3/SF, which may be even more than the cost of the flooring. Our reno has been a serious DIY effort, and we've been able to do more to our home faster by doing the work ourselves. We did the math and committed to laying the flooring on our own.
For the brand, though, we went back and forth on varieties, brands, and underlayment-attached vs. separate underlayment. But then
Select Surfaces provided the flooring for our home--and turns out it is WAY better than either of the other two we used, and thankfully went so much faster!
I shared
here how I was torn on the color, and how we decided on the dark one we went with. We did Vintage Walnut (you can buy Select Surfaces at Sam's Club,
here's our color), rather than a hand-scraped; I find the "hand-scraped" look has uniform dips that make it look like laminate.
DIY laminate flooring install
We removed all of the carpet at our fixer upper on weekend 1. (See the
before photos here--yikes.) The flooring is the brand new line by
Select Surfaces and didn't arrive till 2+ months after we got the keys, so we painted the subfloors and lived on those for a while. Oh, also, it was delayed a week by a snow storm right before Christmas, so frustrating!
The flooring arrived on two big pallets, which were REALLY heavy!
