So yeah, I’m still in the middle of working on the family room floor. I’m in a bit of a stopping point right now. Nothing serious, I just have a few other things to get done. Today, we got some throw rugs at Menards; non-skid throw rugs, that is. Placed them in front of our couches and they look pretty good. Also got three other non-skid throw rugs for the base of the stairs, the entry from the garage and the entry from the patio. However, KC decided she wanted the landing done with the same laminate wood flooring that I’m using in the basement. Well, we call it the “landing”; we live in a split foyer which from the entry to the house you can go upstairs or downstairs – you enter to the “landing”.

Well, I *THOUGHT* I could get it done in a day. I definitely underestimated the work to do here, but have like 95% of it done. The worst part of the whole thing was there were two, yes *TWO* layers of linoleum under the carpet that I had laid there. The carpet had some stains so it definitely needed to be replaced and the laminate wood flooring is a good choice. So I started mid-morning. Forgot the “before” pictures, so here’s the early pictures with the linoleum up. One side has the sound deadener down.

So after a few hours of work (and lunch and dinner in there as well!!) here’s the result:

As you can see, I have one piece of quarter-round and the “cap” at the edge of the stairs to put down yet. I want to paint at least 2 more coats of black paint on the edge of the stair tread, so it won’t be until tomorrow afternoon that I’m completely done, but HEY! I’ll be done with that!

So yeah, it’s been a while. I’ve been doing a lot of little things. Since my computer desk is actually attached to the wall, I removed the legs and put in angle support braces. I also cleaned up the cables and set up cable management ties and such under the computer desk. Now there’s a lot of foot room under there, even with my server and the under-desk file cabinets:

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I also got more of the floor done today. Zach came over and helped me out, which was great@! We got the rest of the main area of the family room done, as well as one of the closets. Of course, Zach brought Laura over! Zach also had an ulterior motive: he wanted to see how the laminate wood flooring went together and learn the secrets of how it went together and how to clean up small errors, and he accomplished that!

So I’ve got one closet left, and it poses a problem because I’ve got some support wood directly on the existing carpet. I’ll need to redo that, hopefully without having to empty the closet. And I also have the computer room to do. Of course, it’s only about 10′x10′ so it should go pretty quick, once I move the five drawer lateral file in there. And then, of course, the baseboard trim and the door casing trim.

Well, I just *HAD* to do it! I’ve started another project at home. About 15 years ago, I put carpet down in our family room downstairs. It was a light carpet and a great change from the dark carpet that we had. I had also drywalled the family room – it had walnut paneling and was very dark overall. Well, the carpet has been spilled on, peed on by our dog, tracked on by anyone and in general just got very dirty. Even our steam cleaner couldn’t clean it any more. I have thought about this for several months and I’ve decided to go with laminate flooring. The stuff that interlocks and floats. There was a great deal at Menard’s so I ponied up and got the flooring. It was only 69 cents per square foot. So I bought 24 packages, which will cover 480 square feet (I hope it’s enough). One of my biggest dilemmas was that I don’t have the space in the house to move everything out and put down the new floor, so I have to do it in sections. I’m working from west to east, which means the longest runs are first. Now, on to the pictures.

Here is how the carpet looks. It’s supposed to be a uniform color, but as you can see, it isn’t.

I started in on this on Sunday. First thing was to rip up the carpet. I had glued it down 15 years ago, but the actual carpet came up fine. I was not looking forward to scraping up the excess glue and pad, but then Tim at work said he had a good tool for this. As it turned out he was wrong – it wasn’t a good tool for scraping up this gunk…. it was the PERFECT tool! Here’s the floor with the carpet, pad and glue removed.

So after taking up the carpet, I laid down the vapor barrier and noise deadening pad. Then I laid out the planks.

Well, I had my brother Al over to help me lay out the planks. If you notice in the pictures, I had them attached to make one long plank. Well, after a lot of finagling I finally figured out this didn’t work. Al and my wife will both say I was very frustrated. I was short and snippy with them during this process. Well, after viewing some You Tube videos from Lowes and some other flooring companies I found I was doing it wrong. So I went out to Menard’s and got the tapping block and end bar tools to actually do the job right. And I went about taking apart the work Al, Casey and I did to re-do it right. And now it looks *MUCH* better!

More progress pictures to come!