Hello, Lovely Oak Laminate!

After a week of allowing our sore bodies recover from the de-tiling of the dining room, we went to the floor store in Davis to look at our laminate options two weekends ago. The prices ranged from about $2/square foot all the way up to something over $5. The salesperson told us the latter is usually installed in places like bowling alleys. She also explained that nearly all of the lower-end varieties are the same in terms of durability and warranty (the price is purely a function of marketing).

We headed over to Ikea in West Sacramento to look at flooring there and see what the price difference would be. This monster store is known for testing the durability of it's products to an extreme level; in fact, they have sections of the different laminates all over the store to prove it's durability with 1000s of people walking all over it each week. (It may be a sales ploy, but it sure worked on us!) These prices ranged from $0.89/square foot to over $4. The cheapest stuff is only recommended for bedrooms (probably because it is SO crappy that it can only handle low-traffic locations).

We settled on the oak Tundra version, which is midrange in price (and slightly cheaper than anything at the Davis shop). We loaded our industrial cart with 11 cartons of Tundra oak laminate, rolls of moisture barrier and foam, and the lengths of transition covers (to cover the edges where the flooring type changes). I got an icky feeling in my stomach when we put that in our cart. It consists of a cheesy (and very brittle) plastic rail that you screw onto the original floor. The only slightly less-cheesy metal transition (covered in the imitation wood laminate design to match the laminate floor) is supposed to "easily" snap and slide into the grooves of the plastic rail. Yeah, right. I told Dave I wasn't sure that the plastic rail would work very well, considering that it would bear the brunt of our feet banging into the side of the transition and the pressure of feet stepping straight on top of it. At least at the Davis flooring shop they sold metal rails (much more durable) onto which you snap and slide a wooden piece as the transition. This option seemed better to me since the metal rail is more durable AND because the wooden piece is a bit more flexible in case you install the rail a bit crooked. Since the lengths of the transition were only $20 we decided to at least try it. We could always troubleshoot with the Davis floor store option later.

After we loaded Dave's tiny Saturn with all our flooring goods, we got home and were all excited to begin our first flooring project. I pulled out the directions and sadly realized that we had to let the flooring cartons acclimatize for 48 hours in the house before installing them. This about killed me! If any of you know me at all, patience is a virtue that I pretty much lack. It was hard for me to resolve to wait. With Dave's work schedule these days and my experiments ususally lasting until after dinnertime in the lab, we had to wait until the next weekend to start installing.

This wait period took me by surprise only because it was an Ikea product. When I think of Ikea, I think of "quick and dirty" solutions to home improvement and/or decorating. I understand the reasoning behind the acclimatization period; I guess I just figured that all of Ikea's products would be geared to weekenders who purchase on Saturday mornings and finish their project by Sunday evening.

First we laid down the moisture barrier and then covered it with the foam:


After cutting some lengths of scrap wood into 5/16" spacers to temporarily edge to room we began installing the tiles across the room. Two cuts had to be made for each section, which did make the process a long one. You'll notice that the above picture was taken during the day while this one was taken at night (and we were only about 1/3 done with the room):
It went much fast after a while because we figured out how to finesse the tiles together:

We gave up around 11pm when we were only 1 section away from the end of the room. That last section required some special trimming and we finished it on Sunday morning. Doesn't it look nice?


Once all the flooring was installed (after MANY trips back and forth into the garage to trim each piece) we attempted to install those crappy transition pieces. HA. There were a few issues: first, about every third hole Dave tried to drill in the concrete subfloor was unsuccessful. The masonry bit would go down about 1/2 inch and then stop, even will all of Dave's weight on the drill. (We think we must have been hitting pieces of the rebar in the concrete.) He finally got enough screws in to hold the plastic rail down. I stood back while he tried to snap and slide that metal-covered-in-wood-decoration transition onto the rail. Did it work? No! It broke the plastic in a few places and we decided (er, I decided) that we would just eat the loss of that transition and move on. We'll purchase some of the metal and wood transition stuff from the Davis floor shop later.

Even without being complete, the room does look much nicer now. It is much more echo-y in there and sounds resonate all the way to the back of the house. These new acoustics will take come getting used to once the house is done-up this way (or would it be "done-down" since it is the floor we're talking about?).

For the time being, we'll spend our time trimming-out the room with new baseboard and casing for the doors. We bought rosettes for each door so that we don't have to deal with anything except butt joints on our surly unsquare door frames. The pocket doors that separate the kitchen from the dining room will be swapped out with new panel doors from Home Depot. They will look MUCH better since last year the electrician accidentally put several screw holes through the current doors.