The story of our flooring

It's a pretty quiet week around here, so I thought it'd be nice to take this time to document some of our house projects.

When we moved into our house on Feb. 1, 2006, we quickly discovered the previous owner was a chain smoker (indoors) with a dog that was prone to accidents inside the house. DH and I are not smokers and I can't stand the smell of it. The clean clothes we had in our closet all smelled of smoke, there were nicotine outlines on the wall from where her photos were hung, yellow stains on the white cabinets. We quickly painted everything with Kilz primer which is a wonderful odor blocker and then we painted different rooms different colors. Mostly all neutrals. The best day was when we got rid of all of the nasty carpet, chiseled up the tile and laid laminate flooring down in the whole house (except the bathrooms). Start to finish, the whole flooring process probably took about 6 months worth of weekends. The laminate floor shows more dust and dirt than we noticed with the carpets, but I know the carpets were just holding all of that dust and dirt in. So gross to even think about.



The flooring is from a local flooring company which we just happened upon one weekend. We had planned to purchase from Lumber Liquidators in Orlando, but we'd have to drive over there and pick up 1600 sq. ft. of flooring. This is the type we had planned on getting from LL 8mm royal mahogany. So we decided to check out a couple local places to see if they had similar product in our price range. We ended up at Georgia Floor Direct in Ormond about 15 miles north of our town. They had big floor samples and we found a product similar in color called whisky barrel with the attached underlayment and it was twice as thick = better quality. The edges were bevelled, water resistant and there was wood grain texture marks which both made it look like real wood. The guy gave us a great deal and saved us from driving all the way over to Orlando. We got just over 2 pallets and by the time we were done, we had about 15 boxes left over plus about 5 that were damaged from the forklift operator loading them onto our trailer which they took back and gave us a full refund (that was over $500 back!). Yeah, the whole process of loading this pallet onto our trailer was an interesting experience. The forklift forks weren't long enough, and the driver couldn't drive the forklift onto our trailer gate (he tried, but it bent) so he got the pallet on there and then proceeded to poke and prod the forks into the boxes of wood floor. 5 of the boxes were physically damaged and thankfully he wrote that on our receipt to make sure we'd get credit for them since they were near the bottom of the stack and it would have taken forever to get those damaged boxes out then at the store.

Seems like I always forget to do before pics for the 'before and after' gallery. Well, here's a sort of before of our living room after the walls were painted and after carpet was pulled out (picture cream colored stained carpet if you want) before the laminate went down. And then there's the after. LOVE IT!


We've since replaced the baseboards and plan to do simple crown moulding and some small accessories to complete this room. Don't mind the specs on the after photo, it was probably dust in the air from the whole process. Glad that's over! On a side note, the big double window on the right will be replaced with an impact resistant new window which will help with blocking out the sound from our street and also help with energy efficiency since the windows in our house now are all contractor original single pane glass with aluminum frames. But that's for another day...