Home Improvement

When we moved into our house, we had carpet throughout the home, including the dining room.  I don't know why people think it is a good idea to have carpeting beneath a table.  I knew that one day I wanted to change that.

View of dining room from the living room

When Mom came to visit, I tried to get her opinion of the flooring under the carpet.  I was sure we had hardwood floors underneath, but didn't know what my options were.  So Mom pulled up a bit of carpet, and what we saw didn't look too bad.

Pulling back the carpet

 Unfortunately, the high traffic areas was worse.  Our floor had a very distressed (or to use the fashionable term-- antiqued) look. We looked at the options and decided that resurfacing the floor would be a little too much work (and a lot of dirt!) and decided to go with a laminate flooring.

I could not believe all the dirt that made its way through the carpet pad!

 Mom did a lot of work scrubbing the floor clean before we got started on the flooring we picked out.  We also learned that it takes a lot longer to accomplish a task when there are little children  around.  I felt that Mom did a lion's share of the work while I held or fed Christopher.

Laminate on half the dining room floor

Mom and I only worked on the dining room area, but I wanted to do all of the living room as well.  Mom did a lot of the measuring while I took the boards outside to cut them on Ian's table saw.  We held off on removing the carpet and getting to work on that until Ian was able to take off a few days from work so we could get it all accomplished.

Living room with all the furniture removed.  Notice where the couch usually resides.

About a month later Ian got some time off and we tackled the rest of the room.  We sent all the kids away so that they would not be in the way and set to work.  The first day (Tuesday May 22nd) we removed the carpet and all the dirt.  Looking at the hardwood floor in the living room made me glad we had chosen to do laminate.  There was a lot more of the distressed wood and there were a lot of gaps between boards.

Living room with carpet removed.

 I still couldn't believe the amount of dirt residing under the carpet and pad.  The picture below only shows half the dirt we were able to sweep up!

Look at that pile of dirt!

I didn't take any pictures of the scrubbed floor.  It looked much better, but was still in need of a lot of work.  On Wednesday we lay the flooring.   This time I did the measuring and Ian did the cutting.  We were able to get almost the whole floor done before the kids came home around 3pm

Ian figuring out how to make a hole for the heater vent.

Now all we had to do was lay the quarter-round and replace all the furniture.

Flooring finished, but edging still needs to be done

How the flooring looks with the quarterround installed.

We had the house back to normal by Friday morning before Ian had to head to work.  I have to say that I really like the new flooring.  I feel like the rooms feel cleaner and less cluttered.  It is a little noisier when the kids are jumping and stomping around, but I worry less if the spill something.

Living room back to normal