the great floor debacle of 2009

I really can’t begin to count the number of times that Mr. M and I have visited flooring stores in 2009… thought we knew what we wanted… and then completely changed our minds and stalled on the whole process. We’d love to replace all of the flooring downstairs somehow, but each time we thought in big numbers, our pocketbooks would shy away from commitment and we’d conveniently forget about the whole ordeal for the time being. That is… until the urge popped back in our brains… and we’d head out to yet another store in search of the perfect answer.
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All of our hemming and hawing came to an end when we got moving on transforming our “extra room” (aka. the den or downstairs room w/o a door), as it will soon be the office so that the office can become the nursery. The previous residents of the home had let their large dog enjoy that room a bit too much… and the need to tear out and replace the carpet has always been on the fix-it agenda. We decided that the room would be the perfect spot to test out the flooring we liked in a large sample setting, without much agony about doing it all at once. Back again we went to the stores, but this time, when we saw the price tag broken down for our little 164 sq. ft. room, we ran away from our handscraped hardwood for good. No matter what kind of deal we were getting on it, it would be a long long time before we plopped down enough to finish downstairs, and it just seemed silly to spend so much so close to baby time.
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So, ladies and gents, we went with the not-so-hip-nor-HGTV-esque option: Pergo. I was shocked myself, to find something that was in the colors we wanted, a texture that we liked, and that lacked the super laminate look, but we did! And the fact that I won’t have to be scared to death of scratching it or messing it up… well that is just the bonus. Now we can’t brag about investing in hardwood, but that’s pretty much the only thing that we lost by putting it in. We ordered our boxes of “Olivewood” online, shipped them to the store for free, and picked them up for Saturday of lots and lots of fun… 
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And the install job, it turns out, is quite easy as well! First step was to strip the room of carpet and tack strips, carefully remove the baseboards and repaint the walls as needed. Mr. M took care of all of that… and sealed up the tack holes with cement as well! Then it was time to lay down the padding directly over the cement…

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Once the padding was all down and sealed, it was time to start laying down the floor boards. We got down two rows before Mr. M decided to switch saws (from his table saw to his miter saw), so we got a little bit of a break in the action while we set-up the saw and got it ready for action.
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Once the saw was up and running, we were back into installation mania! It only took about 2 hours to install the rest of the floor, with Mr. M making all of the awesome end cuts and me sliding up and down the floor on my kneepads clicking everything into place. And you know what, we’re both really really happy with the end result! I’ll post some more finished photos when the baseboards are in and the office begins to move downstairs… but for now just know that the great floor debacle of 2009 is finally over… just in time for 2010 to begin!