Installing A Floating Wood Floor; Living Room Update; Part 6

So, I haven’t had much time to show you what else has happened in the living room, sorry!  But I thought I would show you the new floors we installed.  This isn’t a tutorial, but I will try to let you know some of the things we did while working on it.

First of all we had to decide what wood floors to use.  It had to be engineered, because we are on a slab and we wanted it to add to the resale value so ultimately we choose wood.  Although I should say we considered the new plank laminates too.

We went with the Lumber Liquidators Virginia Mill Works 5″, Hand-scraped, Yorktown Plank.  Picture below:

 Dear Lumber Liquidators,
 If you are listening, I would love some free wood floors so we can finish our master bedroom and possibly our kitchen with it too.  Thanks (hopefully) in advance! …it doesn’t hurt to ask right? 

Anyway, it was over what we initially wanted to spend, but when we saw it on the floor at the showroom and how well scrapes and scratches disappeared with cleaning, we figured it was the one for us.   Especially with kids running around!.. pushing chairs, cars and baby doll strollers across our brand new floor while we bite our nails and pray nothing scratches!

Well we had to get the exisiting floors out, and I was still pregnant at the time, so we asked our local LDS missionaries to come help us rip them out and they were life savers.  We also got sorta funny pictures…. thanks to my husband being the photographer.

Here are the before pics.  There are 3 types of flooring in the room, an entry of wood, fraying-nasty carpet and a back landing of tile.  They all had to come out, some things were harder than others.

Yes, duct tape does many thing, including holding our carpet together for that last year!  That is quality flooring people!

 

 

This is what our kitchen looked like for about 3 weeks.  We only had weekends to work on the floor and one weekend Justin had to go do something else completely so it took twice as long as we planned.  We also had to get a level floor and drying time took the days that we had.   We went all over town for half a day trying to find a concrete grinder, only to use our friend’s grinder which died in the first 2 minutes of use.  So. we bought another, and it vibrated the screws right out of its self… needless to say third time was a charm.  We finally got the high spots ground down and the floor flat.

The good thing about living like this for 3 weeks, is how much you appreciate more your space when you are all done.  Etta however, would have LOVED to keep this wide open space for playing in.  She learned a new special word too “echo” it was a very loud space, and she loves to scream…