Confessions of a Do-it-yourself Lady

Summer Bucket List item #13

Today I glued down a section of my floating laminate floor. This is probably a no-no because now that section of my floor no longer “floats”. I’m sure a professional would be blanching at the very idea of what I’ve done but I’m not a professional. I live in “DIY Land” and the rules are different here. The past thirty years of homeownership have taught me that no matter how many manuals you read or how many “how to” videos you watch before hand, no home project goes exactly how it’s suppose to. Sometimes you gotta improvise and that’s what I did today.

It has been two summers since Hubbly and I first laid the laminate floor in our kitchen. Before that, we spent 8 years living with the nastiest, formerly white, vinyl floor that the previous owners had installed. It took so long to get to it just because the size and shape of the room made it so daunting. Also, I knew I wanted a laminate floor that looked like hardwood but since our kitchen has several kinds of wood, I couldn’t figure out which one to match. Finally I found this beautiful one called “Cherry Teakwood”

See, Isn’t it pretty!…

The first step was to paint all the wood cabinets white. This took a while. Then, we started on the floor. Even though we have put down tile and vinyl flooring before, this was our first experience with a floating floor. The idea is that each board snaps into the next so that it forms one big piece that just sits on top of the foam underlay. Easy right? Not so much.

Problem one was the dishwasher. We knew when Hubby installed it the year before that it was too low and therefore didn’t meet the top of the counter. The new flooring, or a piece of wood the same width needed to go under the dishwasher to even it out. So out it came. Adding the flooring was a piece of cake but some little connector thingy wouldn’t go back on and it took us an entire day to fix and get the dishwasher put back in place.

Problem two came when after doing the first 3 rows of flooring we realized that we had the wrong edge of the boards facing us. It’s hard to explain but what it meant was that the floor wouldn’t stay snapped together correctly. So we had to take it back up and started again with the pieces turned around. Luckily all the ones we cut still fit.

The next problem (and this is where the glued floor comes into play) was the stove. If you look at the above photo you will see that it just fits into the space between the counter tops. In fact when the guys installed it, one of them actually had to pull back in one side of the counter so his buddy could squeeze the stove into the space. It comes out a bit too far too. I can’t open the drawer on the right unless I open the oven door first. It was the closest size we could find within our budget, ok? Don’t judge!

The point is, we were not moving the stove out like we did the dishwasher so we had to figure out a way to get the flooring as far under it as we could. Working backwards from the kitchen door towards the oven (because that’s the direction the pieces snapped together) we had to sort of finesse the ends of the boards about eight inches underneath the stove.  At the time, It seemed to work so we went on to finish the floor. However…

A few months ago we started to notice that the three rows of flooring between the kitchen door and the stove kept sliding apart leaving little gaps at the short end of the boards. The connecting ends had worked their way loose and were sliding back under the stove. Whenever it came apart I had to give it a good kick to close up the gaps again. That got to be a bit tiresome. Hubby and I brainstormed a little and the only solution we could come up with (other than moving the dreaded stove) was to use some liquid nails and glue down the short boards that were under the end of the stove thus holding the rest of the row in place. So that’s what I did! Ta-da! Wow, that was really a long explanation! Sorry.

Now, Jack and Chrissy wanted to be part of this story too so I took some photos of them modeling the rest of the floor…. They look just as good as the floor! 😊

Advertisement