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Our tech team has launched updates to The Nest today. As a result of these updates, members of the Nest Community will need to change their password in order to continue participating in the community. In addition, The Nest community member's avatars will be replaced with generic default avatars. If you wish to revert to your original avatar, you will need to re-upload it via The Nest.
If you have questions about this, please email help@theknot.com.
Thank you.
Note: This only affects The Nest's community members and will not affect members on The Bump or The Knot.
Tell me about your laminate floors
DH and I are strongly considering getting laminate wood floors for the main living area in our condo. Our cats are little puke monsters and have all of their claws, so our carpets are looking pretty rough. We'd like to do it on the cheap since this isn't our forever home and it wouldn't add huge resale value for our area, but we don't want it to look like total crap.
Did any of you install it yourself? What brand did you choose? Has it stood up well to pet traffic? Any tips or advice? Most importantly, are we crazy to think that we could install it ourselves??
Re: Tell me about your laminate floors
DH and I are in the process of installing ours ourselves. It's a pain the a$$ but it's definitely do-able. Keep in mind that you'll need a chop saw and a jigsaw for cutting boards, and be prepared to have saw dust everywhere. The big pains for us were:
1. Removing all of the trim, then pulling out all of the carpet staples, then making sure our floors were level (I had to do a lot of sanding around the floor joints)
2. Removing the toilet so we could do our half bath was a freaking nightmare, but generally speaking toilets aren't hard to remove. Ours was just extra difficult (re-installing it wasn't easy either because our laminate floors are lower than our carpet was, so the plumbing was too high after the laminate was installed).
3. Our walls aren't square so cutting the boards so that they wouldn't end up "tilted" took a lot of brain power. When you first start installing them, the floors also tend to shift a lot when you walk on them so it's really important to pay close attention to your shims and to make sure your boards stay square to the wall.
4. We had to remove (an re-install) our oil heater in the living room which was a major pain.
5. I hated hated hated having to completely empty out the rooms. Hated.
6. Be prepared with a place to store your ripped up carpet and padding until you can take it to the dump.
Anyway, hopefully you shouldn't have all of those kinds of issues but those were some of the unexpected things that we ran into. Just be prepared to run into some crap like that. It is kind of slow-going at first figuring out your board pattern and how to cut them, but once you get the hang of it it goes pretty quickly.
We bought ours on sale at Costco. The brand is called Harmony I think, and the color is Golden Aspen. One thing to keep in mind if you buy somewhere like Costco, is they only carry the floor boards, they don't carry any of the trim pieces. We didn't think about that before we bought it and then realized we would have to order the trim direct from the manufacturer...and they wanted to charge us $200 to ship it. Um, no thanks. Thankfully we were able to find some other trim in town that sorta matched, so we just made do with that. You'll need quarter round pieces for under doors, and special trim pieces for spots in between rooms and for transititons from laminate to carpet/vinyl, etc.
I really like my laminate, it's definitely better for the cats (mine are also big pukers. You should look into getting them a higher quality food, it's really helped with mine). They do have trouble running on it because they slip around so much. I've also noticed that I have to clean the floors pretty much every day because it smudges really easily with footprints (DH never takes his shoes off - ever.). It;s also been driving me crazy because I can't find a cleaner that doesn't leave streaks on the floors. I think it might just be the brand of flooring though because other people I've talked to don't seem to have that problem.
{Blog: Adventures of AlaskanAlison}
Thanks for all of the great info!
We totally expect this to be a PITA, but I just want to know that other normal people have done it before.
I really want to avoid paying for installation if possible.
Luckily we are only doing the living room/foyer/hall areas, so we won't have to work around cabinets or toilets or anything. One problem I foresee is with our fireplace. It's in a corner so the front of it makes a diagonal, which means we'll have to cut some angles on the boards. And I guess we'll have to put some kind of trim around the three sides of the hearth(?).
I can definitely see us having some problems with our walls not being square. I hope that's not the case, but I can see it coming up.
As for the cats... one little stinker just likes to eat too fast sometimes and it all comes up a few minutes later. We've tried all kinds of food, but I think it's just a behavioral thing. She was the runt so she's extra "special".
They make a special molding for in front of the fireplace. We bought our floors at Lumber Liquidators and they are summer retreat teak. I looooove them. The dog hasn't scratched a single one and neither have the children and DH. DH installed everything himself and there are pics on my FB.
Feel free to email me and I can ask DH to respond since he's the one doing all of the work. Currently he is working on the stairs and landing upstairs.
Sorry I can't help with the installation tips/feedback, but I can tell you that we have them in our new house and i LOVE them! We have a 2 dogs (one new puppy) and they haven't scratched, dinged or damaged them at all!
Good luck!!
I have the same general sentiments. They were already installed in our house when we bought it last year, and our 3 little dogs with their little claws and running around haven't caused any damage to them. We love the laminate!