The New Kitchen Floor, January 14 & 15, 2010

I knew one of the projects I wanted to do before we put the house up for sale is to change the floor in the kitchen.  I had put those peel and stick tiles down a few years ago, but, I wasn't happy with how they had migrated leaving some pretty big, ugly gaps.  I loved the color and how they looked against the terrazzo, but, the gaps...ugh!

So, we took part of the garage sale money and bought the laminate wood flooring from IKEA in the Tundra Birch finish.  We had never done flooring before, but, after I watched the video in the store a couple of times, I was pretty certain it was a project Rod and I could do successfully.  Especially with the Dewalt Compound Miter Saw I had bought for myself...er, Rod...last Christmas.  LOL

The main part of the floor took us about 8 hours and it went pretty easily.  The first two hours we did the scraping which taking turns wasn't too bad.  The main time user the rest of the day was all the cuts our tiny kitchen required.  There were only about 10 planks in that whole kitchen we didn't need to cut.  We left off with the thresholds which we planned on tackling the next day. 

For some reason, the thresholds took us as long as the rest of the floor!  Part of it was a break midday to go to IKEA, Home Depot and the soap warehouse.  We were having a heck of a time with the fasteners to go into the terrazzo but still fitting in the threshold track.  We finally settled on drilling a hole, sinking a dowel and then screwing the threshold screw into the wood.  It worked...but...the job wasn't over yet.  Then we had to figure out had to snap and click the parts of the threshold into place.  With a lot of muscle and a little "touch" it finally worked.  The second threshold went much quicker! 

I took a couple days off to do a show and then finished up the trim over the next few days.   I think it turned out pretty nice.  Especially for a $200 project and $30 of that was for the floor scraper!

                                     

 

We did have two problem areas.  One of them is hidden under the stove...that piece on the right side of the oven cabinet, we could never get it to click into place.  The other problem was a tiny piece near the door...which we covered with the trim...except for a tiny chip I nicked when I was nailing the trim in place.  Dang it!  Oh, and now with the closeup picture, I see my tape job wasn't perfect either!  Please, don't look to close when you come, ok!?