After we put the new french doors in it became obvious to us that the rug in the dining room had to go. When we removed the heat it left a section of floor with no rug covering it and a hole in the floor where the heat used to connect to the rest of the system. Along with that we were the proud owners of a rug that was covered in melted orange crayon, yellow spray foam, white joint compound, paint, stain, and polyurethane.
Our goal was to finish off the dining room floor with a Pergo pseudo-hardwood floor. This served two purposes. The first (mentioned above) was to get rid of the rug. The second was to define the split between the living room and dining room better. With the rug running from one room to the other it made it seem more like one big room than two smaller rooms.
Last Saturday we measured out the room and we came up with 150 ft^2. Each box of flooring said that it covered 17.59 ft^2. That worked out to be 9 boxes of flooring. We headed off to Lowes and got 9 boxes of floor and 2 pieces of transition that will be used between the new floor and the living room rug. Each box contained 7 pieces of floor (for you math majors that's 63 pieces of floor).
This past Saturday my father came down to install the floor. Our first mission was to remove the old rug. We made a rough slice through the rug to get it out of the way and then went to work on the tack strips that held the rug in place. While removing those we found a phone cord nailed to the floor using roofing nails (yeah we have no idea either). Once all of the tack strips were removed and placed in a pile of death in the middle of the floor I went to pick them up to carry them outside, got my foot caught on one, it flipped up and proceeded to drive it into my right calf (Injury #1). We then went to work on removing the rug pad. It took me all of 2 minutes to realize that removing rug pads SUCKS. For those of you who haven't had this experience let me explain. Rug pads are made of a material that you cannot cut because it just falls apart. You can rip it, but not in a straight line and it still manages to crumble into a mess. It's held to the floor with staples, lots and lots of them. Where it's stapled to the floor it leaves little bumps of rug pad that I started trying to scrape off the floor then pound the remaining staple. I gave up on that and grabbed a pair of plyers to pull the staples out. Yes it was more time consuming but it was much more satisfying.
Once we had the rug, rug pad, and staples removed, we had to sweep up the awful mess we made. With the mess cleaned up we started laying out the floor. My father got to work on cutting the first few pieces around the door and heat. That took a while because of how oddly shaped those pieces were. Once those were done and in place we were able to get to work putting the rest of the floor in place. It took us a little while to figure out how to get the pieces to snap together but once we got the hang of it, the floor started to come together quickly. We ended up using a leftover piece of the LVL from the header beam to rest against the floor pieces and pound with the rubber mallet. The first piece I tried to put in place I managed to chip and we had to pull it out of service (oops). For a while we were able to get a pretty good run going. My father would cut the odd pieces and put the pieces against the all in place and I would work on the middle rows. It was at this point I managed to miss the 1ft long piece of LVL I was hitting with the rubber mallet and hit myself on the left wrist (Injury #2). This left a nice bruise which is still with me as I write this. As we approached the living room we started questioning if we were going to have enough pieces. We managed to lay it out and find that we were going to just make it.
Before we could lay the last row out we had to cut back more of the rug (and that goddamn rug pad). By this point we gave up on cutting the rug pad and I just started ripping it. Amazingly the results are the same. While cutting the last piece of rug off I managed to stab myself in the finger with the razor blade (Injury #3). We layed the last row in and put down the transition and with that we had completed the new floor.
After installing the floor we went out and got some felt feet for the furniture and new rugs to complete the room.
The stats for the job look like this...
-Time to remove the rug and install the floor: 6 hours
-Number of injuries sustained by The Angry Homeowner: 3
-Number of full Pergo planks left over: 2
-Number of Pergo planks broken: 1
-Number of little felt feet we had to install on the furniture: 44
To see pictures of the new room (and damn does it look good) click
here.
Note #1: I think I'm going to give up building a serial IR Transmitter and just buy one.
Note #2: The lawn across the street is still growing out of control.