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Around the House: Diningroom Floor Part Duex

By Dawn Sailors In Dining Room, Projects

Well it was a long weekend (sorry for the lack of posts) but we finally finished our dining room floor and I couldn’t be happier about it! It is such an improvement and feels so much cozier and cleaner than before.

I started on Friday where we left off last weekend, with a second coat of primer in a few spots on the subfloor. Just to be sure everything (and every smell) was extra sealed and gone for good. By Friday night it was nice and dry, so I laid down our underfloor layer. I was super excited to find a large roll in our storage room left over from when we put flooring in our half-bath. But my excitement quickly turned south when I realized that we were about 5 feet short of enough. Boo. Also boo that it only comes in 100 foot rolls. So my floor budget went up by $25. Not terrible but still an unexpected expense.

But once I ran to Lowes to pick up a roll, we got right to work on laying our laminate wood floor. And in case you’re wondering, you can find this stuff in the wood floor isle. It looks like very thin white foam on a roll and has the texture of flattened packing peanuts.

Now I should explain our choice in flooring. Which really wasn’t a choice at all. See, our kitchen and entry hall were already floored with light oak laminate when we moved in. If I had my druthers, I’d probably have chosen a rich dark chocolate-colored wood, but as it was, we worked with what we had.

Then we had a nice stroke of luck almost 2 years ago, when a family member offered us a boatload of free laminate that he had taken out of his home. And get this, it matches our laminate almost perfectly. So we used it to floor the half-bath, and still had a ton left over. So we used that to floor the dining room. That’s two rooms with new floors for free! Can’t beat recycled and free. Here’s a comparison shot of the existing kitchen floor next to the new floor. They aren’t exactly the same (the new one has a slightly more pronounced grain pattern), but they’re pretty darn close.

But back to the floor. It’s not a terribly exciting, just very very repetitive lining up, measuring, cutting and snapping into place. So I’ll speed it up for you.

And as you can probably tell from the pictures above, Beast helped out immensely.

After the paint was down and dry, this whole process really went pretty quickly. I think we started around 11:00 on Saturday and were cleaning up by 3:00. We still have to get the baseboards done in here (it’s a running theme around the house) and add in the divider strips where the carpet meets the laminate for a smooth transition, but those should be fairly easy to finish up too.

Not bad for two weekends and $25.00. Not bad at all. We’ll have to add in probably another $60 or so for the dividers (who knew those things were so expensive!?), but given that we’ve saved hundreds of dollars by not having to buy the actual floor, I guess we can swing it. Especially since we now get to look at this:

So what do you think?? Anyone else been tackling big projects this past weekend? Or recently had a laminate experience? Hopefully it didn’t involve cleaning up cat pee like ours did. Ick. So glad that’s only a memory now.

-Dawn