New laminate flooring

Do you have some ugly carpeting or out dated linoleum flooring? If so, now is the time to update it. You will likely need an entire weekend to do this but results will impress you. The project goes a lot faster if you have some help. The tools and supplies you will need for this are of course the flooring (try to but the middle price range flooring as it is easier to install), a box-cutter knife, hammer and block of wood, a drill with screw bits (of course some screws 2″ work well) , some underlay material, and the most important item I swear I would never do another floor without is a laminate cutter. The price is about $30 from Windsor Plywood and it saved a bunch of time and did not create dust. Also a jigsaw is helpful if you have curved cuts to be made and some wood glue. Total cost is approximately $500…

Remove the carpeting

Here is how it looks before the start.Not a pretty sight.

It’s easier to cut the carpet into pieces and roll them up before disposal, the garbage-men had no trouble taking care of that. Another thing I might remind you of is to screw the floor in where there were some squeaks. Just be sure to hit the joists unlike my first attempt. Also don’t forget to take off the baseboards and label them and put aside for later.

Lay out the foam underlay

Cut and lay out foam underlay, usually found where the laminate flooring is purchased. This stuff is cheap like 10 cents a foot and really helps to smooth out the floor. An exacta-knife works well for this.

Starting at one end of the room begin laying the laminate

We glued the first row (to each other at the long edges) and placed the full boxes of laminate on them to keep them secure. Subsequent rows were staggered so that the result looked nice. To ensure a snug (but not too snug) allow a bit of room for expansion, we used a hammer and a block of wood to firm up the rows so that they were a tight fit. Again if you bought the cheap flooring you will have a bugger of a time as you have to assemble an entire row and then angle the entire row into the previous entire row. Spend a few bucks more and you can install this flooring piece by piece. I’ve done it both ways trust me the latter is a lot easier.

Laminate cutter

As a told you earlier this tool is worth the rental cost. Not only can it speed up the cutting of the laminate, but it is very exact you can nip off a quarter of an inch easily to get the perfect fit. The other benefit is that the cutter does not kick up dust like a conventional saw would. Unless you have curved edges (like I did around the fireplace) this tool will do it all, otherwise you will need a jigsaw to cut curves.

Stagger the cuts

Unless you want the planks to start and stop at the same place on each row (which is not as aesthetically pleasing) you should stagger the cuts so that each alternate row has a seam at roughly the same place.

Once finished nail in the baseboards and enjoy your handiwork