The basement is still carpet (barf) not thrilled and I fought it for a while but Ryan made some good points about up north and basements and all that jazz that growing up in FL I may overlook. So the rest of the basement is still carpet but my office is now laminate...which was also a struggle. Ryan hates the sound of laminate but we both hate carpet even more. This laminate was the best option for this small space in our basement. We both ended up liking this Lowes, Tavern Oak Laminate. It is $0.99 per sqft (& on sale right now for $0.85) which helped us a lot with our budget!
We have never done flooring before but that has never stopped us from doing any of the projects we take on. We tackle lots of diy projects together which is great because we have such different ways of doing things that we balance each other out and aid each other in thinking differently or using another way if problem solving.
Getting this room ready was a hassle!
We started off by taking up the carpet just like we did upstairs but there was an issue immediately and we knew it would be. The carpet covers the concrete flooring and they used nails to hold the tack strips down which were impossible to get out! We jammed our fingers against the ground so many dang times. Finally, I think after talking to his brother about it, Ryan said that we would use an angle grinder to remove the tops of the nails so that the flooring would not have imperfections that would cause issues with laying down the laminate.
So Ryan tackled that wearing sunglasses as eye protection and some extra sheet of metal against my freshly painted walls to protect them from the sparks. Eventually the nails were leveled and all the remaining nails from the trim were out as well...also not fun due to the poor job they did on the sheet rock when the house was flipped.
Oh did I mention we also had some uninvited guests that were staying with us? One morning I was upstairs in the kitchen and heard something scratching around. I thought it was in a garage since we have 20 trash bags full of food and beer that were left by our tenant in there...yeah gross. So I immediately texted Ryan telling him that something was in a garage. It was so loud I wasn't exactly sure was it was. He called me right away and I walked toward to the garage door when I realized it wasn't coming from there but somewhere downstairs! So I made my way down there looking towards our sliding doors in the back, nothing there but the noise was loud. Scratching and than it sounded like chewing...I knew right than that it was a mouse. I opened my office door and bam, located the little guy. It was in the wall! Just so happens to be the exact corner I had told Ryan smelled so bad that I wore a mask while painting it the other day. It was horrible! Turns out that that smell was a dead mouse!
We had to cute a section on the sheet rock out to pull the mouse out, that is when we found another one!
WARNING
THESE ARE A BIT GROSS
The mice we pulled from out wall (right two are the same mouse)
Sadly, since this, we had heard at least 2 more mice! One in another wall and one in the garage.
Back to the office space.
We put down a 6mil poly plastic sheet for moisture and taped it to the wall just to hold it in place while we got started to keep it from moving around too much.
Next was the underlayment. We used Pergo Gold Underlayment. It came pre-taped but we also bought some to use for the closet area.
We layed the first section down so we could started laying the flooring.
After messing up immediately with cutting off the wrong end of the board we got the flow going and were half way done!
That poorly painted window wall will soon be a white brick wall.
The closet was interesting. We had to get crafty with this section but it all worked out.
The flooring is done and we moved right on to the wallpaper, Ryan's favorite thing! I fell in love with the white brick peel & stick Devine Color wallpaper at Target and talked Ryan into getting it :)
Many curse words later we got the first roll up!
We started the second roll and notice that the rolls were different!
I was so sad!
I shared the photo below on Twitter about it and Target tweeted back! They gave me a full refund! Still not thrilled that they are not the same and look slightly different but the refund makes it a bit more tolerable.
Here is the end result with the brick wall
and laminate flooring
I will share the finished room with you once we get all moved back! Sorry about the dim lighting!
It was almost 3 am by the time we finished.
Much Love,
Amanda
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