Ode to Our New Floor

When we started the process of building our house almost four years ago, we got to choose most of the finishes. At the time, we debated upgrading from the carpet that was already included in the base cost to something nicer, but it didn’t really make sense to pay the builder for it. (It might have been nice to roll the cost into the mortgage, but of course that means you pay a lot more in the long run.)

Instead, we splurged on upgrading to nicer tile in the kitchen, dining room, and foyer (which are all connected together and therefore needed to be done all-or-nothing). Every other floor in the house got covered in cheap, apartment-grade carpet in a very boring, very bland beige.

We’d always planned to upgrade to hard flooring in the family room, and after almost four years, the carpet was REALLY starting to show the wear and tear of being in such a high traffic area. It was dense and matted around the couch. You could clear see the path we walk most often between the kitchen and our bedroom. And each time I vacuumed, I got grossed out by how much dust and dirt that carpet was hiding. (The bedrooms still look ok. We’ll likely upgrade those rooms to nicer carpet in the future, but that’s at least a few years away.)

So it was time! We hired a local company and they installed our new family room floor on Thursday and Friday. We went with laminate flooring since it was affordable, easy to clean and hard to damage. The color — “hickory gunstock” — is a nice, rich brown that looks really great with all the natural light our family room gets during the day. I loooove the result. It’s like we have a completely new family room!

I teleworked from home while the installers were doing their thing, and took plenty of iPhone photos of the process to text to Jose. If you’re interested, enjoy:

Pulling up the old carpet and a view of our lovely slab foundation underneath.

 
Leveling the slab — it took 6 bags of float. This is the only thing they did on Thursday, and it dried overnight.

More photos of the floor after leveling. Yay home builder for doing it right the first time. Not.

First thing Friday morning — putting down the underlayer for the laminate.

 
Yay! New floor! They moved our (extremely heavy) TV cabinet back as soon as they could.

Floors in progress…

 
More progress…

 
Fireplace transition and some freshly installed quarter round.

Almost done! And a shot of the transition to the tile in our foyer.

Wooooo! Finished laying the planks.

 
More quarter round installation, and my tape job on Sunday. It was primed, but we had to paint it to match the existing trim.