Step Two....and Three....

of our flooring project.  Remember step one was mentioned several months ago in this post here.

It turns out buying our new floors was the quickest part of the project.  The 40 boxes of flooring ended up sitting in our music room for a while before we did anything with them.  When we finally got to the "Put in new floors" part of our "Things to Do Around the House" checklist, we decided to have our handy next door neighbor take care of the installation.

While our house quickly turned into a construction zone and a complete disaster, it was nice to have brand new floors in all four rooms in just five days.  We shoved most of the furniture and accessories into our room to make it easier for them to lay the floor.

See what I mean, it was a wreck!

Then came one of my favorite parts of the project.  Ripping out the hideous outdated vinyl floor and....

the brown carpet.  I don't think we were even a bit sad to see this go.

It would have been amazing, if underneath all the old flooring we found hardwood; but instead we found this hospital-like linoleum tile throughout the entire house.

After the carpet and vinyl flooring was ripped out, a moister barrier was laid.  Then came a slightly padded underlayment for cushion and to help with sound, since we are on a slab.

Of course, this is the only in-between picture I took, probably because it was a pretty quick process after the doorways were cut out.

It was so fun to come home one evening and see this in our living room!

Some people cautioned us about putting the flooring in the kitchen because of possible swelling from spills.  Well, Drew Babe decided to perform his own MythBusters by soaking a scrap piece of flooring in a bucket of water for several hours.  While our floor will hopefully never be "soaking" for several hours, we found the scrap piece had no swelling at all.

Myth:  Does laminate wood flooring swell when in contact with water?

Finding:  Busted!  (at lease with our floors)


 (side note:  I promise I don't usually decorate our kitchen table with swords:)

To give everything a finished look, we had shoe molding installed.  Drew Babe decided to go ahead and give the baseboards a fresh coat of paint because the shiny new floors made every scuff and nick on our baseboards stick out like a sore thumb.

Once I get the house cleaned and straightened up, I will post a complete "before" and "after" of The Martin House flooring project.

Break is Over

After a taking an almost 4 month break, I am finally back to blogging.....hopefully.  Since that last post in April much has happened both in the Martin House and the Martin life.

You might remember the project we began a few months ago by purchasing our new floors.  Because we had to cover the kitchen, spare bedroom, living room, and music room, we searched and waited for the best deal we could find; and jumped on it when we found "our" floors at Lumber Liquidators.  Well, that project has finally been accomplished and will soon be described here on the blog.

Also, during our 4 month break from blogging we've been on a few family vacations, I have graduated from Old Dominion University, and we have dabbled in some other projects around the house.  Fortunately I have been pretty good about taking pictures of everything that's going on, so hopefully it will be up here soon!

For now, I'll leave you with a sneak peak of one of the biggest Martin House projects:

Step One

Well, we just checked off step one of our next big project.

For the past year we have talked off and on about installing new floors in the family room, kitchen, and (if we found a too-good-to-be-true great deal) the guest bedroom and music room.  We were waiting for just the perfect deal on the color we wanted.

Our waiting and searching eventually paid off.  A couple weeks ago Lumber Liquidators (or as Drew would call it, Liquid Lumberdators) had an awesome deal on cherry laminate flooring.  The price ($0.79 per square foot) seemed perfect, yet we still couldn't decide.  After pondering on that $0.79 per square foot for a while, I decided to check the Lumber Liquidators' website another time and noticed the price had been dropped to $0.59 per square foot.

I gave Drew Babe a quick call at work and we decided to jump on it.  Next thing you know, we have 40 boxes of laminate wood floor stacked in our music room.

Because of the great price, we were able to get enough to cover our entire house, except our bedroom (the carpet in there is still fairly new).

Not quite sure when this project will start, but I know we are both excited to check off the first step of saying goodbye to this:

and this:

When searching for our floor, we both liked the medium wood shades.  We settled on a cherry laminate flooring:

I'll be sure to keep you posted as we tackle this project of covering nearly 1000 square feet with laminate flooring.  We're open for any thoughts, tips, or suggestions :)