laminate wood flooring

[daoist]

girlfriend wants to redo the floors in her house.

Right now she's got hard wood floors in her entire house aside from the kitchen. We were thinking of refinishing the floors, but due to the tremendous pain in the ass she's considering laminate wood flooring.

Anyone with experience? Owning it? Installing it? Any tips? Whatever?

Thanks.

[Turbo]

I helped someone install some last summer. not difficult to do if you have tools and a few people to help.

I helped my parents do some too, they used the cheaper stick-together kind instead of the grooved stuff.

[nippletwister]

I think it's worth the effort and investment to keep the hard wood.

... but she might need a place to stay during the project.

[DTower5]

girlfriend wants to redo the floors in her house.

Right now she's got hard wood floors in her entire house aside from the kitchen. We were thinking of refinishing the floors, but due to the tremendous pain in the ass she's considering laminate wood flooring.

Anyone with experience? Owning it? Installing it? Any tips? Whatever?

Thanks.

We refinished wood floors, takes about a weekend to strip sand and prime - labour is tough - but when we looked at the prices of new laminate floors, it was a showstopper

[walk around and drink]

I think it's worth the effort and investment to keep the hard wood.

agreed. we took out carpeting to install laminate ourselves (not too hard, by the way, about 8 hours total to do ~1000 square feet), but why rip out hardwood? i can't see the labor cost being much more than materials, especially when you factor in resale.

[nithos]

We were thinking of refinishing the floors, but due to the tremendous pain in the ass she's considering laminate wood flooring.

Hardwood floors are pretty cheap and easy to refinish. My father-in-law and I did our living room in an afternoon. The hardest part is moving out all the furniture, which you would have to do anyways. Also depending on the finish, you might not be able to put heavy stuff back on the floors for 48 hours.

For the kitchen, we just put down a 18'x12' piece a sheet vinyl for under $600 installed. Don't have to worry about water damage (laminate) or glass breaking when dropped (tile).

[daoist]

I think it's worth the effort and investment to keep the hard wood.

agreed. we took out carpeting to install laminate ourselves (not too hard, by the way, about 8 hours total to do ~1000 square feet), but why rip out hardwood? i can't see the labor cost being much more than materials, especially when you factor in resale.

You don't rip out the hard wood.

You lay down this stuff right on top with no fastening or anything. So down the line if she wanted to refinish the real floor, we could just remove the baseboards and take all the pieces off and go to town.

[daoist]

The showstopper for us regarding refinishing is thus:

1. we have 800 sq feet of floor upstairs to refinish. Due to the hassle of renting the equipment and getting the stains to match, we'd have to do that all at once. Yuck.

2. Where are we going to put 3 bedrooms, 1 living room, and 1 dining room's worth of stuff?

3. She's got kids, they'd have to stay elsewhere.

4. The folks at menards and lowes indicated we'd need to do 2-4 coats of stain, with 24-36 hours of waiting in between. That's about a week of unlivable home.

Sure, we could pray for no rain and put a lot of furniture out in the backyard and in the basement, but moving all that furniture long-distance up and down stairs would be another monumental task as it is. We could skimp on the stain and just do one or two coats, but my impression is that with the hassle we might as well "do it right", you know?

The kitchen is tiled already and it looks pretty good, so we're going to just leave that as-is for now.

Thanks for all the suggestions so far.

[Turbo]

Id do the laminate because, like you said, you can tear it up and do it right later. Id hate to refinish a floor just to have a bunch of kids destroy it

[daoist]

Oh shit, when you redo the trim on a door, don't you have to redo the interior pieces too? So they match? Basically we'd have to rehang the doors?

[daoist]

Any suggestions to this?

https://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key ... l=en#gid=0

[walk around and drink]

Oh shit, when you redo the trim on a door, don't you have to redo the interior pieces too? So they match? Basically we'd have to rehang the doors?

wouldn't you have to if you were putting laminate on top of your existing flooring, because of the added height?

[WrenchHead]

Isn't pergo more expensive than just paying some handymen in a van to sand/strip/refinish existing wood?

And the refinish would look 100x classier than pergo.

The only time I'd be considering pergo is when I've got a rough floor that's just a sheet of plywood. If you HAVE hardwood, I'd never cover it up with particle board. And like I said, I think it'd be cheaper to pay some guys to come do it than to even buy the fake laminate wood. My father-in-law paid 800.00 to have his house done by a general contractor. That consisted of a kitchen and two bedrooms. Maybe 400 sq feet total. That included dust control (sheets over stuff,) sanding, stain removal with bleach or however they did it, and refinishing. The only thing he had to do was move furniture and anything sitting on the floor into his carpeted livingroom, out of the way.

In the 50s, oak hard wood floors were a sign of poverty and you put carpet on them. Today they're classy as fuck and easy to keep clean. If you get them refinished with a hard coating, they'll handle kids pretty well.

My floors are all unfinished because I'm too lazy to undergo all of this. I've learned to live with the stains and ugly appearance because it just doesn't matter that much to me.

[bigassbertha]

Do not refinish the hard wood yourself. Do not get shitty laminate flooring. Hire the hardwood done, it's really quite reasonable to have a pro do it and it's pure pain in the ass to do yourself.

Do it right once.

[caddymac]

Is there enough meat on the floors to refinish?

[daoist]

The issue with refinishing are that we can't easily give up use of the entire house for the days it would take. Not to mention where all the furniture would go during the process.

[bigassbertha]

Are you still referring to doing it yourself or hiring it done? If hiring, why not get half done one weekend and the other half done a couple weekends down the road? Or three weekends so you're only out 1 bedroom at a time? You'd still have use of the house (just pile all the shit into one room - you'd have to move it around anyway to install laminate) but wouldn't have to move your shit into the yard or move out for a weekend.

If the hardwood isn't fucked already refinishing shouldn't cost much more than good laminate. I assume the laminate option isn't the "floorpaper" thin cheapo stuff...

[daoist]

What do you mean by "fucked"? I mean, if it looked like a million bucks, we wouldn't be considering refinishing it or laminate at all.

If we do laminate we could do it ourselves. Woman friend called a contractor and is at least getting a bid for refinishing it. We don't think we could refinish it ourselves. So basically I guess your idea is to tell the contractor to do it in stages (room at a time, half/half, etc) and just make the problem of matching the resulting finishes their problem instead of ours? Do you think that'll inflate the estimates, and how much?

Man, hiring it out is a disappointment. I really wanted to get the big spinny buffer thing like in all those 80's movie montages and have it go crazy and ride it around the house.

[bigassbertha]

What do you mean by "fucked"? I mean, if it looked like a million bucks, we wouldn't be considering refinishing it or laminate at all.

If we do laminate we could do it ourselves. Woman friend called a contractor and is at least getting a bid for refinishing it. We don't think we could refinish it ourselves. So basically I guess your idea is to tell the contractor to do it in stages (room at a time, half/half, etc) and just make the problem of matching the resulting finishes their problem instead of ours? Do you think that'll inflate the estimates, and how much?

Man, hiring it out is a disappointment. I really wanted to get the big spinny buffer thing like in all those 80's movie montages and have it go crazy and ride it around the house.

That is the best idea yet. Riding it around, anyway. I haven't come across anyone that refinished their own floors and thought it was worth the savings.

By fucked I mean cracked, gouged, completely lacking finish and immediately soaking up water spilled on it, etc.

http://barnumfloors.com/sitemap.html

They did a great job with my brother's floors, right around $2/ft^2. About the same, again, as decent laminate. 'Cept you don't have to do it yourself. By the time you finished the 3rd room you'd probably be sick of it, with two more to do.

Who knows, maybe if you hire it out they'll let you ride their sander. They might even give you a discount if you wear a helmet and let them put your ride on youtube.

[WrenchHead]

I think it'd take longer to put in a pergo floor than to sand what's there in terms of down time.

The only downside to sanding is your whole house fills up with sawdust, so you have to clean it afterwards. Otherwise it's a win all around in terms of time, price, and end result. People only put in those fake wood floors when they don't have real ones there to work with.

As for doing it yourself? Unless you plan on doing it more than once, it's probably not worth learning how to do it. I've heard horror stories about people who sanded down part of the floor too much and had a noticeable depression where the sander sat too long.

If I was doing a whole house, I might teach myself how to do it in an unimportant room so I could use the skill throughout the house. But if it's only the main floor or something, I'd call three contractors and get an idea of who I liked best.

[nithos]

The sander I rented had a built in dust collection system. I was suprized how little dust was left to clean up.

[Epaminondas]

I put down laminate in my living room and hallways a few years ago. It was really pretty easy, easier than carpet.

I got the snap together stuff from Lowe's and you buy a tool that helps you snap the pieces together. Buy an expensive padded underlayment, this I found is well worth it, especially since you have real wood underneath. Notch all the door trims, etc with a hand saw so that it fits. Then put the tongue and grooves very carefully for the first few pieces because it's easy to ding up the faces when putting it together until you get used to it. I wouldn't use a mallet unless absolutely necessary they should snap in easily. The only hard part is planning for the edges opposite you started from. You'll need a good saw to rip the end boards.

Yes you'll have to retrim everything. Rent/buy a compressed air finishing nailer and it goes right up. I'd recommend the prefinished stuff unless you like having a big stack of trim boards putting off lots of VOCs .

[daoist]

So by the way, we had our floors professionally refinished (rather than laying laminate over top) last week. We're still in the process of moving furniture back since we're attaching felt to the bottom of everything. It looks great.

[Santa]

cost?

[WrenchHead]

Yeah, curious about your cost per square foot and who did it. Also, pics?

[Santa]

All of that information would be fantastic

[daoist]

Working on pics.

We went with JC Toland

http://www.jctoland.com/

They charged us 1500 for 800 square feet, including sanding, no stain, 3 coats of oil-based varnish, and replacing some missing quarter round. They could have stained it, but we decided against it after discussing the pros and cons.

One thing to note is that they messed up their bid process internally; they bid it out at 600 square feet. Jeremy (business owner) left out one bedroom when figuring the cost. However, the bid was to do all of the bedrooms, etc, and they honored their bid. So we really got 800sq feet at 600sq feet price. We chose JC Toland not only because of the price, but also because he seemed knowledgeable and honest. I don't remember exactly the other bids, but Toland's was greater than 25% cheaper than the next one, so it's not like their screw-up is the sole reason it was cheaper, if that makes sense.

[WrenchHead]

Also, how long did it take start to finish? Is the varnish pretty durable looking? My house has bare wood floors which are holding up fine, but I'd like to get them sanded, de-stained, and refinished.

[Jobu]

Myself and a friend did my dining room(about 10x10') in about 2 days. We used a large orbital and a small belt sander to remove the stain, then again to prep for the new stain. I used a polyurethane product, which I just poured and wiped over the surface. The only part I wasn't comfortable doing was the large orbital sander. Otherwise it's not hard, just tedious.

[nithos]

Even the large orbital sander isn't too tough, just don't rush it.

I really need to do a couple more rooms in my house before too long and after 5 years, the high traffic spot in the living room is starting to show some wear.

[WrenchHead]

I've had my bare floors for 7 years now with no noticeable difference in the look. It obviously doesn't look as awesome as a finished floor, but it also doesn't seem to be degrading in appearance. That's the main reason I'm leery about doing it myself, out of fear it'd start to degrade.

The bedrooms in my house were finished wood floors and the varnish or shellac is chipping off of them. The living room and dining room were unfinished because they presumably had carpet over top of them their whole life.

You can see stains to the lower left portion where someone must have left muddy/wet boots sitting and/or someone was murdered and left to lay there. I'm not sure how well those would bleach and/or sand out of the floor.

Otherwise, the floor looks fine to me. The sanding would do it some good to flatten the boards all to the same height though.

[DTower5]

I've had my bare floors for 7 years now with no noticeable difference in the look. It obviously doesn't look as awesome as a finished floor, but it also doesn't seem to be degrading in appearance. That's the main reason I'm leery about doing it myself, out of fear it'd start to degrade.

The bedrooms in my house were finished wood floors and the varnish or shellac is chipping off of them. The living room and dining room were unfinished because they presumably had carpet over top of them their whole life.

You can see stains to the lower left portion where someone must have left muddy/wet boots sitting and/or someone was murdered and left to lay there. I'm not sure how well those would bleach and/or sand out of the floor.

Otherwise, the floor looks fine to me. The sanding would do it some good to flatten the boards all to the same height though.

Can you walk on that with bare feet - does it take the moisture out of your feet if you do - after we sanded but before we put down stain and top coat we would walk on it and it just didn't feel right

[WrenchHead]

The house was built in 1952, so it has been this way so long I don't think it feels weird when walking on it barefoot. We rarely have the windows open and the AC is set at 70 right now, so it's pretty dry in there. I run a dehumidifier in the basement and keep the humidity at 55%. Maybe I just prefer being dry though, so I can't say. I think if you just sanded, the sawdust might be somewhat to blame? The pores in the wood on this floor are filled up with dirt from the carpet that was over it for so long I think.