Katie & Todd Blake

Hello Interweb! We have returned with all sorts of grand ideas of blogging more regularly! In the past months of blog absentee-ism, many of our attempts at being responsible, grown-up type folks have not gone as well as one would hope. But amidst all this travail, we have done one very grown-up thing! We have become home owners! We are the proud owners of a little two bedroom condo in Centennial, CO. It was a foreclosure and it is in need of a little TLC. So, every month, we are going to pick a little (or sometimes big) project and attack it, weekend warrior style! Then we will blog about our success or abyssmal failure. We decided to start the year off by bidding farewell to our nine-year-old linoleum in the kitchen and dining room! After many trips to Home Depot and advice from real grown-ups, we went with the click together wood floors. First step was ripping out said gross linoleum glued to our cement subfloor. I have to admit, Todd did all this prep work himself while I was at work. He got it all done in one afternoon, which was impressive. Getting the linoleum and the glue up was difficult and required a lot of elbow grease. Then there was a fridge to move, cabinets to unmount, and an oven range along that far wall. Amazing that he was able to do all that without the help of my massive muscles... And then came the big question. Do we rip off our baseboards or not? Luckily for us, my dad tipped us off that we could use quarter round to cover the gap between our floors and our baseboards, saving us the painful job of ripping up baseboards and trimming them down to fit over the new floor. Here is the part where we admit our novice weekend warrior status (like Wort in Sword in the Stone, pre-Merlin...). If we were smart, we would have taken this time to do all the other prep work. We did repaint the baseboards, but we should have done our wall touch ups now and taken off the door frames and really thought about what kind of transition pieces we needed from the hallway into the kitchen and from the door into the house. This would have also been a great time to measure and cut our quarter round, so we could have painted it and let it dry while we laid the floor. Alas, we did not. Thus, a two-day project became a four-day project.
Then came laying down the floors. The first couple rows, we thought we were never going to get it. They just didn't seem to like fitting together and we were afraid we would just end up with a bunch of useless splinters by the time we were done. But we persevered and eventually things started "clicking." ahahahaha, punny! The best investment we made was a rubber mallet! It helped some of the stubborn joints without hurting the wood. And it turned out to be a much better option than just pounding the wood with the heel of my hand. Ouch.
Here we are making sure to keep a quarter inch gap between our walls and the new floors. This is the gap that we covered up with the quarter round, and it's also the gap that keeps your new floor from buckling when it expands in warmer weather. Once we got the hang of it, laying down the floors went pretty smoothly. Our process was a little more complicated because instead of a nice square room, we were doing an odd shaped kitchen and dining room with lots of angles. But, all the more excuse to use the power tools. Or just to admire my manly husband using power tools. Seriously, could he be more adorable? After much coaxing, he did get me to use the saw and the nail gun. It was exhilarating and terrifying. And once we had nailed down all applicable surfaces, I was introduced to the miracle of a caulking gun! Now, I don't know about the rest of you, but up until last weekend, I pretty much thought door frames, baseboards, cabinets, etc, just sprung from the wall and were pretty much embedded into your house. And then we took off our door frame to fit the new floor under it and I learned about caulk. To me, it was like magic. You have this piece of wood just stuck up against your wall. Add a little strip of caulk, smooth it out with your finger, and voila! It looks completely natural and seamless, like it's been there the whole time! Yes, dorky, I know. But it was my favorite part of the project. And that, ladies and gentlemen, is how we re-did our floors!