A carpet cleaner commercial on the radio inquires "When's the last time you've cleaned the biggest air filter in your home?" The punchline is that the largest air filter in the home is the carpet, and no one realizes it. But if you have animals and allergies to them but still have them anyways because life without dogs isn't worth living, then you already are aware that carpet is disgusting. Ours was no exception, despite the fact that it was only about seven years old.
But with allergies that showed no signs of getting better, my mom said we needed to get rid of the carpet. She's said it before but this time I really heard it. And it consumed my thoughts. I measured the floor, priced out the same tiles we have in the kitchen and even had an email ready to send to my contractor. But when I told Patrick about it, he was a hard NO on tile in the living room. Despite the fact that I think his reasoning wasn't really that valid, I pivoted and asked my dad about his click together flooring that he installed within the last year.
He really sold me on it, beginning with the 79 cents a square foot price tag and the fact that we could install it in a day, meaning no labor costs. With a bunch of giant dogs too, he said his floor looked fine still, and considering that I also have a bunch of giant dogs, the durability was a concern too. With all of that in mind, I headed out to Ollie's to see what they had in stock and if it looked like what I wanted.
First of all, Ollie's is a total sensory overload. There's stuff just piled everywhere, crammed onto rows and rows of shelves with barely enough space between them. Things that don't belong next to one another in a retail setting are coexisting in close proximity, and people don't seem to mind. I ignored the stacks of ranch-flavored potato chips and the five foot tall outdoor planters and tunneled my attention to the stacks of engineered flooring at the back of the store. One box looked to be the color I wanted to I picked up a box, bought it, and brought it home. Here's an Ollie's specific tip: Buy the first box and join their loyalty program. You'll get a 20% off coupon that you can use for your next purchase: the remaining boxes of flooring!
It matched well enough with the pre-existing hardwood and the tiled kitchen floor, and didn't look too terrible with the knotty pine walls (more on those in a minute). The next weekend I cleared out the back of the truck and picked up 11 more boxes, keeping in mind to get at least 10% more than necessary to account for cuts, mistakes, and messed up boards. We had 218 square feet to fill, so 12 boxes did the trick.
Putting this floor in was an interesting experience. We moved everything out of the room, I tore the carpet up, and rolled the massive amount of fibers up the best I could considering how bulky and unwieldy it became. And trying to drag it out of the front door myself was an exercise in failure. Patrick had to help me wrestle it out of the door and even then we did not get very far with it — only as far as necessary to get the door to close again! This linoleum, reminiscent of a high school cafeteria floor from the 90s, was underneath.
Luckily everything was flat and there were no mushy spots or water damage. I did have to pry up what felt like a million carpet tacks though, using pliers, a flathead screwdriver, and a headlamp, thanks to the really terrible lighting in the room.
The next day, a Saturday, we were ready to begin. My dad brought over a chop saw and a jigsaw. I added my circular saw to the mix of tools. After the first set of boards were laid, where the tongue had to be cut off of the back, it went fairly well from there. You go down one direction with the boards, and the back up the other. It took four whole boards and one partial board for most of the room until we got to a bump out closer to the kitchen that's hiding a fireplace. A little more math-ing came into play here, but it was about the same up through the end. We started getting tired and left the last bit for another day, the part where board would have to be cut verrrry precisely to fit into the last slot.
After the floor was all in, the next step was quarter round. I took a small piece of the flooring to Lowe's and matched quarter round, the piece that goes between the wall and the floor to cover up the gap. The back of my thighs hurt for several days after the big floor laying frenzy so I was just as happy to wait until the following weekend to use a nail gun (favorite tool ever) to shoot those down, and also some threshold transitions between this flooring and the hardwood in the next room. This is what it looks like now!
You can also see that we got a new back door installed recently too. This also plays into my allergen reducing strategy because the previous back door had a gap under it that was so large you could see daylight. And that meant dust from the backyard was whooshing in, covering everything with sand and making the air even filthier.
The flooring seems to be fairly resistant to scratches from the dogs who aren't sure why they can't get a grip on the floor in this room anymore. They go careering and slide into the couch, which is pretty funny. They're already learning though that it's different. We haven't had any liquid accidents on it yet but I am hoping they'll keep that up and keep it pee-free. But if they do, this will be a better place than on the porous and much more expensive to fix real hardwoods!
Overall, this project cost $210 for the flooring, $20 for the flooring installation kit, and $64 for the quarter round for a 218 square foot room. It could have been completed in a day if we had more help, but it wasn't crucial that it be done in that short of a time frame.
The carpet has been gone for three weeks now and I can really and truly tell a difference in my breathing. I had been getting stuffed up pretty severely by Sunday thanks to being in an allergen-laden environment for much longer stretches than the days I had to go sit at work. With a fresh new air filter in the HVAC unit, the Roomba getting run at least every other day, and no carpet, I feel like my journey to having allergies not ruin my life is finally getting somewhere!
Check out more of the (kind of slow!) progress on our house.