The floor saga continues

Shortly after my last post, I jumped online to do some quick research and get some prices.  We had a few important limitations:

• Floor should be no more than 1/2″ thick.  The plywood was already level with the other floors around it, so we didn’t want to have a huge threshold jump.
• Floor should not be a glue-down floor.  We wanted either mechanical fasteners or floating.  I had a slight preference for floating, due to the supposedly easier installation.  We didn’t want an adhesive for a few reasons, two of the primary ones being installation issues (wait time until dry, mess, etc.), and most concerning was the floor’s permanence when using adhesive.  With a mechanical fastener, we can reasonably expect to be able to pull up the flooring at some point without a huge amount of damage to the plywood.  Since the plywood is in good condition, it could potentially serve as the subfloor for all kinds of other flooring, so we didn’t want to face the prospect of ripping it out and having to replace it needlessly. 
• Floor should be relatively easy to install.  This project has great priority right now because we prepared only for a temporary rearrangement and inconvenience.  If this stretches for more than a few days, then I’m going to have to come up with some other solution for the dining room furniture, other than having it sitting in the living room like it is now. 
• Floor materials must be available today, ready for pick-up.  This one is a biggie.  See the above point for one reason why.  With a few weeks of lead time, we may have been able to order precisely what we wanted, but that wasn’t a viable option. 
• PRICE!  We don’t have thousands of dollars to spend on a floor that we thought was going to be an easy, one-day, zero-cost job.  We figured that we might have to spring for a large carpet for the room, if the center of the floor was in nee of some help.  That was going to cost around $300-$400.  We were hoping that we wouldn’t have to do that. 

After my research and showing what I found that fit these qualifications to Jenny, we decided to make the trip to Lowes to take a look at these things in person to see what we liked.  We had two definite products in mind.  One was a parquet floor that went down in one-foot square blocks.  The floor quality was good, but what I was nervous about was that it was supposed to be glued-down.  I was trying to avoid glue, and hoped that I might be able to use mechanical fasteners (pneumatic staples, in the case of flooring).  Jenny didn’t like it much online, and neither of us liked it in person.  The second product was an “engineered” (read:  veneered wood) wood flooring.  This product looked quite good in person.  The veneer isn’t thick enough to take a future sanding for refinishing, but it has a 15-year wear-through warranty on the finish, which I liked.  It is a standard tongue-and-groove 3/8″ thick flooring product.  The price was pretty reasonable, even with the threshold moulding that we had to buy.  We looked at a few laminate flooring options, too.  Though we found some that looked pretty decent, they all almost invariably looked like new construction.  I had also heard “horror stories” of laminates coming undone after a few years, gashes and other damage that can seriously impact the floor, etc.  The only major problem that I had with the flooring was that the floor was in 3″ wide boards, instead of the 2 1/4″ that we have in the living room.  We were willing to sacrifice that, though, so we came home with about $1000 worth of hardwood floor in the car. 

Yes, it is more expensive than a carpet, and more expensive than the laminate flooring.  It isn’t as expensive as some of the other flooring options we saw there-this product was price quite reasonably.  The 15-year warranty is a big deal for us, too, as it means that we should be able to get the floor to last at least close to that long.  In the end, we decided that it would be better for our sanity and better for our house to install a real wood product in the room.  We couldn’t justify doing a shoddy job in this room, after we worked as hard as we did to get the living room in shape. 

The only problem with all of this, of course, is that I’ve never installed a hardwood floor.  The flooring company (Armstrong) had great directions available online, though, and I’ve seen this process done before, so hopefully we’ll be able to make this happen. 

After we got home with our flooring and got it all into the house, we got back to work on the rest of the carpet cleanup.  I had already rolled, bundled, and removed the carpeting itself to the outside.  We still had to work on getting all of the tack strips removed, and then the padding and infernal staples.  Since we were now doing a hardwood floor, too, the quarter-round also had to be removed, as well as the thresholds for the doors to the kitchen and hallway. 

I worked for a little while on my own taking up the tack strips.  I needed to get a start on those so that Jenny would have a place to work to start removing staples.  Once I had a few of the tack strips removed, she got to work pulling up staples and getting the padding ready for bundling.

After I had the tack strips removed, I went around and started on the quarter-round.  Some of this stuff was in good shape, and came up without any issues at all.  Some was in really bad shape, and broke and splintered in different places (not to mention the few pieces from under the windows that practically just fell apart in my hands).  While I was doing the quarter-round, I also decided to remove the ugly heat register.  It was in pretty bad shape, and was ugly, so it had to go.  While I did this, Jenny continued to work on the staples. 

After I was finished with all of that, there were still some more staples left.  ARGH!  So she and I worked on staples up until about 6PM, when i twas time for us to clean ourselves up and head for my parents’ house for dinner and to see my sister, who came home from Baltimore .  After dinner, I was headed out to see a few friends of mine who I haven’t seen in a while.

By the time we left for dinner at my parents’ house, all of the staples were removed.  All that remains now is to bundle the padding pieces, sweep the floor, and we’ll be ready for action on the floor installation.  I hope to have the majority of it done by tomorrow.  We’ll see how well that works. 

Pictures coming soon….

jonathan