Floor!

One of the things Bill and I have been talking about doing nearly since we moved into this house almost two years ago is to somehow have hard wood floors in the living room and dining room.  The existing berber carpet is totally not us plus it's rather disgusting and won't come clean.  And hard wood would definitely add huge resale value, which we may need in a couple years.

We know that there's real hard wood floors underneath the carpet, but our neighbor told us that the previous owners used to keep a dog confined to the dining room... and it didn't necessarily get let out when it needed to.  So even if the living room is fine, there's a good chance the dining room would have some issues.  Plus if we were to sand and refinish the existing flooring, how on earth would we keep the cats and ourselves off of it for a few days??  With the layout of the house, we'd be confined to either the kitchen and laundry room, or the upstairs with no way out!

We've priced pre-finished hard wood like we did in our Toledo house's kitchen, but that'd be around $2000 just for the wood itself... not gonna happen!

So when we saw a Black Friday ad for Menard's that had wood-looking laminate flooring for $0.76/sq ft, we just couldn't turn it down!  It's our favorite finish too, called gunstock but looks like a medium oak - exactly like our Toledo kitchen, ironically.

We ended up spending about $1280 at Menard's after tax, which includes the laminate with a box or two extra, all the pad to go underneath, extra trim for the edges, and an area rug.  Because of the sale, our receipt told us that we saved like $1150!  Dang.

Bill has been working hard today to get this flooring in.  We had talked about waiting a week or so until I'm officially done with the school term and can help him more, but then we can't put our Christmas tree or other decorations up until that much later.

I have to admit, this is one of my favorite remodeling projects we've ever done... I can live a functional life while it's going on!  There's no loss of water, heat, kitchen appliances, bathroom facilities, whatever!  The only minor issue is my dishwasher is relatively out of commission, but that's just because it still has the china, silver, and crystal in it from Thanksgiving dinner and the dining room is full of furniture and we can't get to the china cabinet to put it away yet.  But Bill's definitely finishing up the living room flooring either tonight or tomorrow, so then everything will move out of the dining room so that floor can be done.

If you're curious to see pictures thus far, check them out here.  I'll be adding more pictures in bunches as I take them throughout the project, and I'll definitely post when it's done!