No, not “Honey-Do” this time (part 2 – apply elbow grease & knees, too!)

Our Labor Day camping trip set the office floor project back a few days. Boy, having fun out in the woods is exhaustive! I’ll write another piece on the camping trip later. Where are we? oh, my home office. Removing the baseboards and ripping up the carpet, padding were the easy parts. I had to cut them up into to smaller pieces and toss them into the dumpster at work. Don’t worry, I got an OK from the facility coordinator.

So, is Labor Day a day to rest or a day to do more work? I wonder sometimes. For this Labor Day, it’s ALL labor! After getting rid of the carpet and padding there were still carpet tack strips to remove all around the perimeter in the room. These things have short tacks all over them, removing them is like cutting down a rose bush…proceed with extreme caution! It was tedious work but after about 30 minutes of kneeling and squatting, I got them all out. I took extra time not to break them up because the last thing I wanted was to have wood splinters all over the floor. Luckily this semi-skilled handyman didn’t suffer any blood loss during the removal.

Oh, the carpet padding, about 4 large pieces in all, were stapled down so….yeah, back to more kneeling and squatting. That took another 30 minutes of work. I went through every square inch in the room to make sure no nails, staples were on the floor. Time to install the floor plank, not quite! Every tack strip and staple I removed, left a small protrusion around the nail / staple holes. You guessed it, back on my knees again. They needed to be sanded down. There was a lot of debris on the floor when it was finally all done = another hour of work. I swept the room twice and vacuumed thoroughly for a good 20 minutes. Good thing the weather was cool and breezy or I’d sweat like a hog for sure!

I took a 15 minute break, checked my emails, my crops on Facebook Happy Farm, etc, then headed back to the office. Weird, I could hear my footsteps echoing in the room as I approached it. Ha ha…"Better not cut cheese in here, old lady could probably hear me from the family room.", I thought to myself. Installing the laminate floor planks was quite straight forward. For those who don’t know what laminate floor is here is a link. Also, link to a comparison between wood floor and laminate floor. The key point to installing floor planks is to make sure that they are staggered when you install them. The stagger pattern enhances the plank interlocking ability. The biggest drawback to using this pattern is that you have to cut the planks up into pieces to give it sort of a randomized look.

First box of planks was installed in roughly 30 minutes, there were 9 planks in a box. I spent extra time to make sure I left adequate, uniform gap around the perimeter, wood planks expand and contract with ambient temperature and humidity. Oh, did I mention that the planks need be left in the room where they will be installed for 72 hours before installation? Open the cartons and place them all in the room to let the planks "adapt" to the surrounding temperature and humidity. I did my homework by gathering as much information as possible before I started the project. Pat myself on the back.

The first two boxes took a little longer then I picked up the speed. The width of the room can only accommodate two full length pieces. One plank must be cut to size, there is a trick to it. The piece to be cut needs to be turned 180 deg. so the "tongue" section of the plank isn’t cut away. The "tongue"part of one piece meets "groove" part of another piece, this is how the planks "bond" together. So far, about 5 1/2 cases of planks have been installed, see below. I think another 1/2 day of work the floor will be done. After the floor is done, I will paint around the lower section of the walls then install the baseboards. Stay tuned for Part 3.

It gets smokey when I cut the planks with the miter saw, sparks fly, too!


A little more than 1/2 done at this point. I need to trim around the floor vent.


The above photos were from late last night. I resumed work after I got home this afternoon. Check out my progress, it’s about 95% done! The last part is a bit tricky but I think I have an idea on how to finish the last row. It’s about 8" from the wall to where I stopped. Each plank is only 6" wide, which means I need to trim an additional three piece at ~2′, then attach them to the 6" planks and install as 8" wide modified planks. I know what I’ll be doing this weekend – baseboard shopping and painting. Part three will have the finished look with furniture, some bookshelves.

original post date: September 10, 2009