Wood Laminate Floor (Part 1)
After talking about it for years, Lori and I finally decided to rip up the carpet in our living room and replace it with a wood laminate flooring. The living room receives a fair amount of traffic, so it would be nice to have an attractive surface that is really easy to clean. We decided to go with wood laminate instead of real wood mainly because the maintenance is easier and also because the materials are a lot cheaper than real wood. Also I prefer the smooth surface to the sometimes-uneven look of wood.
So after getting the materials and letting it acclimate for about a week, we ripped up the carpet in the living room and got rid of the padding. Here is what the floor looked like after removing the old flooring:
There was a lot of glue on the padding that caused bits of it to stick when we pulled it up, so we had to use a floor scraper to get all the remaining foam and glue up. After that we swept the floor and scrubbed trouble spots and let it dry.
The next thing we did was to lay down a moisture barrier. The moisture barrier is a plastic that feels about like a trash bag, but slightly heavier. The barrier has a self-adhesive, but we felt better taping all the seams ourselves.
After the moisture barrier was put in place, we had to put down padding because the boards we bought did not have any padding of its own. The padding was a bit more difficult because we had to make sure that nothing overlapped to cause unevenness when we put the boards down. Here’s what it looks like on the floor:
You can see in the pictures above that my cat Fiver has really been enjoying the work.
After the padding, we put down about 5 rows of boards. I would have gone farther last night, but the tapping block I was using to tap the boards into place broke. After work today I have to get a new one and we can continue. In the next part I’ll have more pictures with the flooring down as we finish laying that and get the trim back on the walls.