Our House DIY ~ Laminate Flooring

I have been promising this post for a while now but I JUST got around to cleaning the house enough that I felt comfortable taking pictures of it. 

We have been very busy making our new house our own. It has taken many hours of work after coming home from the office and many sore backs and achy knees but I can officially say that the majority of the really hard work is done. The rest is all in the details and paint touch ups. 

When we moved into the house, the entire thing was beige. Every surface was the same boring non-color and we could not wait to change it. I knew that I would only be happy if we got the majority of the work done early on, so we moved in and hit the ground running. 

I knew that the biggest project would be the flooring. When we signed all of the paperwork on our place and everything was finalized, one of the first things we did was run over to Home Depot to check out some flooring. I played around with a couple of ideas and settled on a nice dark floor that had a lot of texture and character  David loved that it looked like real hardwood and I loved that it was a gorgeous dark color that looked incredible with the paint color I wanted to put on the walls. We ordered it in almost immediately and waited for a call to come pick it up.

Putting it in was such a process. After ripping up the carpet, we found that we would have to put in an extra layer of sub-flooring to bring everything up to the same height as the linoleum sections. After a quick trip to the store and some help from some great friends, we finally had the sub floor down and the flooring began. It took an entire week of evenings, one whole Saturday and a couple of hours on Sunday to finish everything. Brian and Conni Pohl were instrumental in helping us get the job done. If it weren't for them and their tools we never would have even known where to begin. Thanks guys!!

Here are a few photos from the project. Please ignore some of the patches on the walls. We are going to have to do some touching up after ripping the carpet out. Also.... sorry for some o the crappy blackberry photos. When we moved in we had no idea where the camera charger was.

~ It took us two car loads to get all of the wood back to our house ~

~ Laying the Sub Floor ~

~ Rolling out the underlay ~

~Yay! New flooring! ~

~ After night one ~

~ Progress! ~

~Tour de France and some floor laying ~

~ Sydney was unimpressed by the mess ~

~ Moving into the kitchen ~

~ Front room before...~

~ Front room after! ~

~ Front entry before... ~

~ Front entry after! (The green and yellow mats will obviously be replaced by a nicer front mat) ~

~ Dining room before... ~

~ Dining room after! ~

~ Hallway ~

~ Garage  Entry ~

~ Another view of the front hallway ~

~ Kitchen before... ~

~ Kitchen after! (many more renovations will take place in here including new cabinets and a butcher block island ~

~ Family room before... ~

~ Family room after! ~

~ Another view of before... ~

~ And after! ~

Mrs. E