New floor time

I am so happy with my new floooooor. We've been waiting a while to replace the floor in our entry way, because the carpet was scary. Not only was that the dogs prime place to pee and poop toward the end (we always cleaned it, but still, gah), but it was also the section that was soaked when our old water heater went kablooey and flooded the front hallway.

We started by ripping out the old carpet and exposing the wood flooring below.

My husband sweeping the floor. There was sooo much powder-fine dirt underneath the carpet pad (shudder). Now I see why people replace carpet every time they move.

I also discovered lovely carpet tack strips. Be extremely careful if you are removing these, because they are sharp.

Once all the carpet, tack strips, and staples were up, we were ready to lay down the floor. First, we put down some BlueHawk Underlayment. We didn't have to, but we wanted something between our new floor and the wood.

We bought 100 sq ft of Trafficmaster Allure flooring from Home Depot, and it is freaking awesome. It looks like wood, but is actually made of rubber. Waterproof, skidproof, and pretty dang resilient. It was slightly harder to put together than regular hard laminate floor, but still not bad.

We found the easiest thing was to link the pieces into long strips, then click the long strips together.

While we did that, Kaylee practiced hammering with her plastic hammer, golf tees, and a big block of styrofoam.

This was the annoying part. The wood molding actually goes all the way to the subfloor, so I had to use a special saw to make the bottom even with the rest of the molding. Then we had to cut the floor to fit into the small spaces, around the molding, etc.

But it's so worth it, because it's gorgeous!

Candids:

The guys trying to put in the final (omg annoying) piece

Kaylee made a square out of the boxes and was walking inside of them.