Give your room a breath of fresh air by swapping out your grimy carpet (that maybe hasn’t been updated since the house was first built) to laminate flooring. Ana and I got around 300 sqft of laminate as a gift from a friend. Our friend replaced their laminate and we were able to use the salvaged pieces for our living room. It was perfect because we had never installed floors before and there was less pressure since it was for free. If we had the choice between laminate and hardwoods, we would’ve bought laminate flooring due to the more affordable price point and durability (especially with two dogs).

Link to Project Checklist

This project seemed daunting at first but ended up being pretty easy once we got in the groove. Before we get into things, here’s a list of the tools we found helpful during this project. As time went on, we needed different tools for different situations, but just as a point of reference, we installed the laminate in our home (1 room) with a razor blade, nail gun and a saw. We upgraded since then to a few more tools that made it soooo much easier.

Basic tools 🔨if you’re on a budget like us the first time ($) [Link to project checklist here]:

  • Utility Knife or Razor Blade (Basics) – Used to score the pieces to size.
  • Nail Gun (Basic-ish) – Some of the finishing laminate pieces need to be nailed down as well as the quarter rounds that get installed on top of the laminates to cover up gaps.
  • Hammer and Flat Head Screw Driver (Basics) – Used to pry up the carpet holding strips.
  • Hand Saw (Basics) – Used to cut quarter rounds at an angle to join them up at corners.

If your budget is a bit more flexible and you’re looking to invest long term into your home with other renovations, we would consider buying these items to make your projects easier ($$$).

  • Miter Saw (HUGE UPGRADE) – Don’t need a hand saw if you have one of these, used to cut all of your laminates to size, maybe cut them at angles etc.
  • Dremel (HUGE UPGRADE) – Very specific use case here, in our experience, we used this tool to shave off space in door jams. The distance between the door jam and the floor was too tight to fit our piece of laminate, so we had to trim up the jam.
  • Jig Saw (HUGE UPGRADE) – Used to cut the long skinny pieces of laminate (or any other special cut) at the end of the install. Was used to cut metal transitions too.

Additional Items that were helpful but not directly needed for the install ($$):

  • Caulk Gun & caulk (Needed to be professional, but if you’re on a budget maybe wait this one out, unless you’re renovating a bathroom) – When you install quarter rounds it won’t always be perfectly flush against the existing trim or floor. Therefore, you need to caulk that gap to make it look seamless. (full honesty time, it is over 2.5 years and we still have not caulked and filled in the nails for our quarter rounds… We were to anxious to fill the room with our furniture and we are just…. lazy.
  • Prybar – Great for peeling up those carpet holding strips and trying to pull together the last few pieces of laminate closer.
  • Rubber Mallet – Used to bang against the Prybar. Metal on metal makes my ears feel like they are bleeding.
  • Knee pads or thick gardening cushions – Great for sitting on or kneeling for the long period of time prying nails and those carpet holding strips.

Additionally we just wanted to give you an idea on what our install timeline was, so that maybe you can compare and figure out how long your floors will take. Everyone’s situation is different and we know when we installed flooring for our sister (she has two young boys) we didn’t want them running around the floors with potentially nails sticking up.

Timing, we’ve done this process three times now. Our timeline was based on 2 bedrooms and 2 closets. We found it best to dedicate a Friday evening after work to demo the space. That includes removing the carpet, carpet pads, carpet holder strips, staples and just general cleaning. Saturday, full day installing the bulk of the laminates. Sunday, finishing pieces and quarter rounds along the edges.

Before we get into our process I did watch a video to get an idea of how to start so that’s pasted here.

The first step would be to remove all of the carpet, carpet pads, carpet holding strips and all of those annoying staples that held the carpet down. To remove the carpet you can usually just pull up one corner of the room. In the picture below we started near our vent. For disposal, we cut our carpet up into three longer strips.

Above is what our subfloor looked like after removing the carpet and carpet pad. It a bit hard to see in the picture, but we had a cup of staples that were removed from the ground. So be careful walking around, please wear shoes or slippers to protect those feet. Also what we failed to get a picture of are the carpet holder strips. Those are usually on the edges of a room, it will be a little wood plank with a bunch of nails sticking upwards and that’s what’s used to hold the carpet down.

After that we purchased flooring underlayment to protect against moisture. This flooring underlayment goes directly on the subfloor, it should have an adhesive that sticks to the plastic on it self. When I say stick to the plastic on itself, if you look at the image above the plastic is cut to length, one edge will be plastic and that is so that you can connect each piece to each other to have little to no moisture penetrate through. The adhesive won’t really stick to the sub floor so I would just try to lay it as flat as possible and you can start adding the flooring on top.

We then started to lay the laminate down. If you have existing laminate that will meet it together, we would recommend to lay it in the same direction as the other laminate. In some cases you can lay the laminate beneath the molding on the side, if not just butt it up to the trim and you can use quarter rounds to cover the edge. If you don’t have a saw to cut your laminates, some can be cut to size with a razor blade. Simply score the laminate to size and take both ends of the laminate and snap it over your knee/thigh area and it should snap. If it doesn’t easily, then you might need to get a hand saw or we would recommend a miter saw.

In the picture above we had to slice the laminate long ways to make thin pieces that would fit in the final space between the new and the other laminate. Here to make your job easier you can use a jigsaw to make those long thin cuts. Similarly, we also had to work around a vent, we would recommend a jig saw to make those intricate cuts. In the picture above we bought a metal transition piece. We used a hand saw to cut it to length. Most transitions install a little differently that each, ours had plastic screws that the transition would snap into.

The pictures above show the final product. 😁 At the time we had little furniture but we were so happy with the result. We can’t thank our friend enough for gifting us with nice laminate. Each picture shows the progress of how that space transformed into what it is today.

Project Completed September 19, 2017