Laminate flooring installation-my experience

My wife Lynne and I bought Laminate flooring last March from a local Lowes home-center store to do a small room in the basement; installed over a cement floor where cat-urine soaked carpet and padding had been.. (where's the stinky emoticon..)

My wife bought me a compound miter-saw last Spring to do the job. I used it for the first time this past week. It's a "floating" floor that uses a tongue/groove type joint that locks together. Each piece has an integral pad on the bottom.



Installation over cement requires laying-down sheets of moisture-barrier.



This was a first for me.. but I had a good helper with the right equipment..



 The first course or two of flooring was a bewildering learning experience.. but got easier with subsequent courses and learning the technique with the installation tools. Being a "floating" floor; there are 1/4" plastic shims supplied to maintain an expansion-joint between the new floor and the walls. The staggered-shims don't provide a "solid" backboard for tapping-in the following 2-3 rows when starting. Achieving tight-joints at first, took some patience.



There are two installation tools for this flooring design. They work quite well for their intended purpose. One is a hard-plastic step-block with a lip that fits down along the top of the floor's tongue-joint. I used a heavy rubber mallet to strike it. The other tool is called a "pull-bar".. and is a 12"L. piece of flat-steel plate with 90 degree opposing angles bent on the ends. It's used at the end of a course when the flooring is too close to the wall to effectively swing a hammer to seat the end-joint of the final piece. The end piece is cut to provide the 1/4" expansion-joint.. so this tool hooks over the end.. and gives you 12 linear-inches to smartly swing a hammer. I chose to use my True-Temper "Rocket" A20R.



Here's the saw that Lynne bought me.




A table-saw is required to rip the edges of the first and last courses of flooring. One must do the math on the flooring-width and # of courses, so as not to end on the far side of the room with an excessively narrow course.

Instructions advise pulling each piece of flooring from a different box to assure color/shade symmetry throughout.



No job is without its gremlins it seems.. and this one was no exception. The closet door-casing was too low for the flooring to fit under. Too low by #$%&ing microns..



The X-acto razor-saw did the trick.. but I might need shoulder-surgery soon. I found my back-saw.. and used it for the other side; which was still laborious. I don't own a reciprocating-saw.. and there wasn't enough clearance to use one if I did.

The finish is "Marcona Hickory"



Overall I'm pleased with the installation. It took about 10-12 hours over two successive days to lay the 144 sq. ft. including the challenges along the way.

Other helpful tools/supplies are;

A. a white "Stabilo" (grease-pencil) to mark the flooring-pieces for cut-off. It's much more visible than pencil-lead on dk. wood. They can be sharpened to a point in a std. pencil-sharpener.. and are more accurate than a crayon for finish-work.
B. a rigid, flat, chisel-tip scraper for tapping-along the top base-board joint, and break the paint/caulk-seal for removal.
C. a claw-hammer/wrecking-bar and backing wood-blocks for prying-off the base-board.
D. a vacuum-cleaner.
E. a cold-chisel to shear-off leftover nails from carpet tack-strips. (cement floors)
F. an awl to help remove expansion-shims after the flooring is installed.

"Stabilo" grease-pencils in my pencil-jar. White and blue, from when I worked at the sign company.