OT--ANyone installed flooring before? non-carpet variety?

[peanut4us]

Inspired by the other 2 threads that mention new floorig... I'm seriously considering some kind of laminate/pergo-esque flooring for Sara's room. I'd like to do it in the family room too, but it kind of sprawls too much into other rooms. In any case, was it easy? what would you do differently? What kind of flooring did you use? Would you use a different kind of flooring next time?

Come to think of it... we really need to replace the crappy sheet vinyl in our kitchen too :) DH is going to love this!

[Jeanne]

My DH has installed hardwood and tile. I would urge you to reconsider a Pergo floor. It's junk really. And it's not that much cheaper than a hardwood floor. The problem with Pergo is that the actual wood is only surface deep so if you get a scratch, the scratch shows up white. You can't even try to repair it as you would with a hardwood floor.
The hardwood wasn't that hard to install (likewise with tile) but you need to make sure the sub floor is really good. And with these installations, you will need the proper tools. You can rent them from Home Depot, Lowe's, etc...

What's his comfort level?

[peanut4us]

>>What's his comfort level?

LOL! The better question is what is MY comfort level with HIS comfort level! Ever see the cosby show episode where Dr. Huxtable thinks he can do plumbing??? LOL! Seriously though. I'm not sure he's up for it, that's why I was asking. But on the bonus side, at least in Sara's room, it is exactly a rectangle... no funky cutting.

ANd thanks for the feedback on the pergo... one of the reasons tha twe hate our current kitchen vinyl (other than that it is ugly) us that it is so cheap and thin... seriously, if you drop a fork, htere's a hole left. x(

So thakns for the feedback... anyone else?

[crl]

We installed cork flooring in our kitchen nearly two years ago. It's the glueless click system (sort of like Pergo). We love this flooring! Cork is resilient so it's comfortable to stand on and things are less likely to break on it--dh dropped a crystal glass on the floor from the counter a couple of weeks ago and it didn't break. Also cork is environmentally friendly.

And it was pretty easy to install. DH is the handy one--I'm just a fairly incompetent assistant. But he says the hardest part was cutting pieces to size at the edges so if you're up for that you should be good to go. We ordered our floor off of www.ifloor.com

Good luck!

[Jeanne]

***LOL! The better question is what is MY comfort level with HIS comfort level! Ever see the cosby show episode where Dr. Huxtable thinks he can do plumbing??? LOL! Seriously though. I'm not sure he's up for it, that's why I was asking. But on the bonus side, at least in Sara's room, it is exactly a rectangle... no funky cutting.***

LOL myself! Just wanted to add that there are several good books out there on flooring. Books that deal exclusively on the subject will be very detailed. Once you look at those, go to:
http://www.hometime.com This website will simplify the installation and give you a true read as to whether or not to attempt it.
Best of luck!

[vpalmer]

Pergo is AWESOME! I have had Pergo in my home four for years and I will NEVER go back to carpet or hardwood floors. The great thing about Pergo is that it is virtually indestructible. Fours years later with an 80 pound dog, lots of furniture moving, and 9 months with a baby has left us without a SINGLE scratch. When we purchased our flooring four years ago, we purchased the touch up kit, which is the same color as the floor and would camouflage any scratches, etc . and have never even opened it! Furthermore, two years ago, our Christmas tree fell over in the middle of the night, leaving a gallon of water on the floor for 6 hours and the floor was not damaged at all.

We installed the Pergo ourselves. We have Pergo Original (requires glue) downstairs, and the glueless variety upstairs. The glueless variety is easier to install. You simply lay down the underlayment, and use little plastic spacers along the borders of the room as you are laying the flooring. You will need a good saw to cut the end pieces but the pieces pretty much snap together. There is a learning curve and it moves slow at first, but once you get a groove going, you can move fairly quickly. My DH and I did it together. I will say that we do enjoy home improvement and my DH is pretty handy though, so it may depend on the individual person as to whether or not you would want to lay it yourself.

As to price: we purchased the Pergo from Home Depot, signed up for the store credit card and got an additional 10% off. It was about $2.97/sq. ft. before the discount.

I understand that many people are against laminate flooring because it is not "real wood." But if you can get past that, it is a great floor and has served us well.

Veronica
Mom to Eva
Born on 6-12-03

P.S. Here is a picture of what the floor looks like. Of course, all my pictures of the floor include a baby these days. LOL!

http://www.windsorpeak.com/dc/user_files/3416.jpg

[egoldber]

I would also urge you to reconsider Pergo unless the cost of real hardwood is truly prohibitive. My SIL (moderately handy) installed it in her kitchen and DH (advanced handy) helped her. It looked great. For awhile. And it still looks great as long as you don't look at it too closely. But it has a lot of wear marks on it from only moderate use.

HTH,

[MartiesMom2B]

Wow, I've never heard of a cork floor before. Does it really look like cork from a wine bottle. I looked at the site and couldn't see the cork floor very well. Does it stain, if you dropped food on it accidently? I'm really interested.

Sonia
Proud Mommy to Martie 4/6/03

[hobey]

My DH and his Dad installed an engineered wood laminate (not Pergo) through our entire house (except the kitchen which is industrial vinyl composite tile) and we love it--super easy to clean and very durable. We went with a European supplier from floors.com because I didn't like any of the Pergo finishes. It took them a week to get 1500 sq ft down. We did use the click together floating floor and not the kind that glues in place. Our subfloor was also extremely smooth concrete so they did save some time on prep.

Raquel
Nathan's Mom 12/19/03

[crl]

Nothing has stained it yet. (And it's had red sauce etc spilled on it.) It has a finish on it--a lot like wood floor does. Ours is finished in polyacrylic if I remember correctly, but it comes in different finishes. I have a cleaning person, but my instructions for her are to vacuum it and damp mop if there's anything sticky on it. Seems to work just fine.

Ours sort of resembles a wine cork in that it has that random pattern to it. Athough, I think ours has less pattern than a wine cork--if that makes any sense. The color is the same as the lightly stained white oak floor it is laid next to. And the finish gives it a bit of shine--again about the same as our semi-gloss finished wood floor. You can get cork in all sorts of colors. You can buy samples online--or if you live in a metropolitan area you can probably find a flooring store that has samples to look at.

DH and I both really love this floor. If we ever build a house, we may do the whole thing in cork. (In addition to loving the look, comfort and lack of maintenance, I love the fact that it's environmentally sound--dh descibes me as being crunchy (peace-lovin' granola type) and I won't deny it.)

[toomanystrollers]

I'm going to have to vote NO on Pergo - my SIL ripped hers all up and replaced it with hardwood.

My DH put down (nail downed) prefinished wide oak flooring - came out very nice, but when we go to finish off our addition, we're going to go with unfinished oak flooring and have someone come in and sand and polyurethane. I think we can get a harder, more durable finish this way.

[mamahill]

We put Uniclic in our kitchen because from our research, it showed it to be better in places where water might be spilled than Pergo. It's a floating floor that clicks into each other (just like Pergo). We had yucky linoleum down before and I love this stuff. I haven't had a problem with scratching and I've dropped all sorts of stuff on it. My mom put it in one of her bathrooms about 6 years ago and it still looks great.

Oh, and we did our kitchen in a day. The hardest part (by FAR) was pulling up the linoleum since the previous owners decided to use some industrial-strength glue underneath that made it so we had to (literally - I'm not exaggerating) chisel it off with a crowbar. The rest was easy. You can see part of it in this picture...

http://www.windsorpeak.com/dc/user_files/3428.jpg

[bnme]

We just installed Pergo in our bedroom. Well, mostly done by my DH who is pretty handy. But I did help some, too. I personally am not a huge Pergo fan in the sense that its obvious that it's not wood. But I feel it is an attractive, durable, cheaper, low maint. option. And there are so many color choices. We had a certain budget and Pergo fit the bill. I think its a great choice for a bedroom.

Hardwood seems like it would require much more skill to install, but that may be just my misconception. My DH who has done tile, installled a shower, built a wall, done electrical, etc in our house would never even consider laying hardwood himself. But maybe just because we've never heard of anyone who has.

At a local flooring place, Pergo started at $3 a sqft, plus $3 for installation. I think the cheapest hardwood was around $8 sqft installed (not sure of the cost for materials only). So it is close. We ended up ordering from Floorshop.com and it came out cheapear even with the shipping at $100+. We had it in about a week and it was delivered by a local trucking company. I think the price there was $2.05 sqft. We went with the Prego Accolade.

WARNING-becareful when comparison shopping because Home Depot/Lowes have there own classes of Pergo -they don't sell Accolade, its called something else. Even some of the colors have different name -very frustrating!!!!

[sbjf]

The hardwood flooring was installed by a professional. It's cherry and ran us $6. per sq foot installed.

We booked the same guy to do our upstairs in all cherry, paid him half the amount up front and never heard from him again (we sued him, and now have a judgement against him, we'll probably never see the money though-long story). Main point, never, never, never pay up front. If they say they need it for the materials say you will go get the materials or just find someone else.

So we are a few thousand in the hole but wanted to have the nursery, stairway and upper hallway done in something besides carpet. So we went to Floor & Decor and bought laminate that looks like our cherry for $1.39 per sq. foot. Fabulous price.

Our brand of laminate is called 'Tucson' and it is lovely, as you saw in the nursery pics. (I will try to post some of our floor-in-progress pics, too). It's the click together kind, SO EASY! I helped dh get started and then once he got in a groove it was a one man job till clean up.

We had most of the tools already, the one thing we wanted was a table saw for this project though, we chose to buy one at Home Depot for $100 instead of renting it because we didn't want to have to be on a time limit as far as when we got it finished. We spread out the job over a five day period. (3 actual partial days of work, with days off in between). When you rent tools I imagine you would want to finish sooner so that you're not charged as much.

The main tools we used were a tapping block, hammer, plastic spacers, duct tape, knee pads (a must!), a wet/dry vac to get all the dust periodically (but any vacuum would probably work), the table saw, measuring tape, some special saw ETA: it's called an 'undercut saw')that helped us trim under the door frame areas, (goggles for dh for when he cut the flooring with the saw. Maybe it sounds like a lot but all the tools and materials were truly cheap except for the table saw. Floor and Decor carried the other stuff we needed. In addition to the actual laminate we need that red padded stuff that we layed down first (on top of our sub floor), then we taped that down/together and started laying/clicking the flooring together.

If you or your husband are good with measuring this will be an easy job. It's really just time consuming more than anything.

We had put up crown moulding a while back and I found that more of a pain.

To answer your other questions:

1. YES-it was easy.

2. The only thing we would do differently is not pre-pay the hardwood floor guy. We wouldn't change a thing about doing the laminate ourselves, made no mistakes and it was the first time we did it.

3. We used hardwood downstairs and it has 3 coats of polyurethane. For the money, and since this is a house that I don't know for sure we will be in forever, I might not have done real hardwood. Although our 105 pound dog hasn't scratched it it has been scratched by furniture-before we put the felt down. Yes it's fixable, but will I fix it? Probably not.

We used the laminate upstairs cause it was cheaper (we needed to save money esp. since we were ripped off for a few thousand dollars) and honestly just as pretty, possibly sturdier/more scratch resistant.

4. I would let dh decide what to use in a future house as far as laminate or hardwood, I don't have a big preference, for me it's all about how it looks, lol :-) and they both look very pretty.

We will never have carpet again, never. If we buy a house down the road w/carpet we will rip it out and put down hardwood/or laminate throughout before we move in, it's that nice.

Also, keep in mind that whenever you put down this type of flooring you greatly increase the value of your home and when I look on realtor.com they all say 'hardwood floors', they don't differentiate between hw and laminate if you get my drift. You'll get the money back if you sell someday for sure, gotta love real estate.

Let me know what you decide!

Click on these two attachments and see if you can figure out which is hw and which is laminate! (we have an extra crib set that we put up on ebay so that's why we have these pics).

[sbjf]

Here are the pics of the laminate job in progress:

[sbjf]

It's cherry hardwood.


http://www.windsorpeak.com/dc/user_files/3454.jpg

[MelissaTC]

We have Pergo and have had it in our kitchen, dining room and half bath for 4 years, our multi-purpose room for almost 2. I have to disagree with others here. Ours has held up to A LOT of abuse, no white showing here! No scratches, no stains, nothing. A lot of people think it is hardwood when they come over and are surprised to learn it is not. DH installed it and did a fabulous job. We would totally do it again...

[vpalmer]

I have already given my Pergo testimonial, but I have to agree with Melissa; several people have mistaken our Pergo for hardwoods as well. No one even knows it's Pergo unless we tell them!

Veronica
Mom to Eva
Born on 6-12-03