DIY: Installing Laminate Flooring
Laminate flooring has seen a huge growth over the past twenty years. For its simplicity, beauty, and durability, laminate is a popular choice for people who are looking to save a little money, and not worry about the high maintenance of carpet or hardwood. The styles vary greatly, from oak to stone to bamboo laminated floor planks. Even more than that: installing laminate flooring is a reasonable Do It Yourself project. With the right tools, a little patience, and thorough instruction, you can have the satisfaction and budget saver of installing laminate floors by yourself.
For a complete guide on how to install laminate flooring, be sure to consult with manufacturer instructions. They will give specifics about the underlayment pad you buy and the specific laminate planks you have. For a general outline, however, these are the basic steps of laminate floor installation:
1. Rip out your old flooring. This includes carpet, padding, tack strips. Get rid of any padding that sticks, level out a concrete slab with thinset. Vacuum well.
2. Remove baseboards, carefully, if you want to try to reuse them. Cut off bottoms of door jams and case openings.
3. Now its time to install laminate floors. Roll out your underlayment pad, tape the pieces together. Lay out your laminate planks, staggering the joints. Many planks simply snap together.
4. Leave ¼ inch around the circumference of your room. Installing laminate wood flooring is treated as a floating floor; it’s not attached from underneath, or at the rims. Use spacers when you first start out.
5. Replace the baseboards.
The trickiest part about installation of laminate flooring will be going through doorways. Get good advice about this part. You may need to trim your snapping joints so they can slide together, and use wood glue to secure them. In general, however, these instructions are applicable to installing glueless laminate flooring.
Installing laminate flooring on stairs is a little bit trickier. Firstly, laminate has “unfinished edges” that would be unattractive on an “open” stairway. Laminate is better advised for closed stairways, with walls and baseboards on both sides. For safety reasons, you also don’t want this to be a floating floor. Be sure to apply adhesive thoroughly on the plank’s underside. Start at the top of the stairs, so you don’t step on your newly placed laminate, and so you can get around after done admiring your work! You won’t want to get trapped upstairs. Then, grab yourself a lemonade or beer.
Always look into care and maintenance of your laminate flooring as well.
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If you are interested in laminate flooring, be sure to check out a brand called Quick-Step. They have a beautiful array of laminate floors. They look so realistic to hard wood. They also have an installation video available on their website. Take a look at us.quick-step.com.
And, I second the books things. I hate books treated as decor. One solution a friend of mine tried was to buy lots of sheets of the same color paper to cover the books with. He laser printed simple titles onto the same color paper and glued it onto the spines for identification. It looks beautiful AND its functional.