Tiring, But Fun and Satisfying

Last weekend was very tiring, but fun and ended with a sense of accomplishment. Debby, my sister came down from Calgary to help me lay laminate flooring in our living/dining room. She had done this before and I had helped Griff lay the same laminate in our study. However, for both of us it had been a while since we had done it.

I spent Friday taking out the rug, underlay and all the staples and nailboards that were holding those in place. It made for a long day what with moving furniture, my bed and TV, back and forth across the room so that I could still use them and yet get the rug out. I left part of the rug in place so that the furniture left in the room would not mar the underfloor. The hardest thing to move was our upright piano. I had visions of it tipping backwards knowing that there would be no way Debby and I could get it upright again. However with a lot of manoeuvring I managed to get it moved into the front hallway.



Saturday morning arrived and I busily got the rest of the furniture moved out of the room, except for the TV and table which was too heavy to move (besides if I moved it out of the room I would lose the satellite connection and we wouldn’t have any music to work to), and was already to start when Debby arrived at 1100. We started by deciding which direction the boards would run and where we would start. We got one row in place and went from there. Trial and error that first day figuring out how the ‘click and lock’ laminate worked. We managed to get one corner of the room done – approximately ¼ of the whole job.


While I made breakfast Sunday morning Debby decided to read the directions since we both felt there must be an easier way to lay the rows of boards than the method we had used on Saturday. As it turned out there was and Sunday went much faster. We were able to get the entire floor laid up to the area where we would need to cut the boards lengthwise. Up until then we, I should say Debby since she did all the saw work, were able to do all the crosscuts with Debby’s circular mitre saw. I was very grateful that she came to help. She worked the saw like a pro and she had the arm strength to push the boards together that I lacked. She also came up with a solution to the one problem area.
On one wall we have a stone fireplace. Trying to figure out how to get the boards cut to correspond to the irregular edge of the stones was puzzling. She suggested that we lay tile on the floor in front of the fireplace and that would give us a straight edge for laying the laminate against. The fireplace has a raised hearth that has black ceramic tile on it so that seemed like a good solution. I went and bought some black tiles and laid them out where they would be and laid some laminate against that. The result was great. When Griff gets back next week we’ll lay the tile and then finish laying the laminate when we can access a table saw to make the lengthwise cuts.




As I said a tiring weekend, but we had a lot of fun and found the results very satisfying.