Replacing our carpet with laminate

I'm going to apologize now - there are a LOT of picture in this post but I want to post them all because I feel like they help do the project justice! A few years ago, we had a neighbor with our exact same floor plan replace their carpet with laminate wood. I remember thinking it looked good but definitely wasn't thinking oh my gosh let's do that! Then, a friend I used to work with who is also now a family because she married Jake's cousin {I set them up} did it too and it looked AMAZING. AND THEN Jake's buddy Kjell and his wife Paige put it in their brand new house and I officially fell in love. We've HATED our carpet since we bought the house. I remember thinking I didn't want to buy the house because I hated it so much and Jake kept telling me that things like carpet can be changed. Life got in the way and we just never got around to changing it out. And then we fell in love with laminate and decided to do that! Since we knew someone who had done it on our exact floor plan, we had a VERY good idea of what it would look like and decided to do it. 

We got all the supplies at Lumber Liquidators in Lindon and we loved them. The quality is fabulous and they were cheaper than Lowe's or Home Depot. And let me say again - the quality is fabulous. No marks from Max's nails, no marks from how many bajillion times he drops his dumb bone or I drop the baby monitor or whatever - the floor still looks fabulous after 3 months {seriously, it's taken me FOREVER to do this post!} 

Without further adieu, here are the pictures! We'll start with some before shots of our incredibly disgusting supposed to be white but turned gray carpet. 

Standing in the laundry room

Standing in the master

Hall leading to the garage/master/laundry

Standing at the front door looking in the living room 

Standing nearly Kaycee's room/guest bedroom/Kaycee's bathroom

Leading into the kitchen. It always grossed me out how black that part was

Behind the couch leading to the backyard 

Standing in Kaycee's room

Standing in the guest bedroom 

We chose to do the work ourselves rather than pay someone to do it. We started by tearing out the carpet. Good thing I married a VERY tough, hands on manly guy. He manhandled that carpet like nothing!

"Seriously, another picture?"

The hall with no carpet 

Tearing out the living room 

Living Room

Yep, our carpet was sitting on top of that. And I vacuum with a Dyson 3x a week. SOOOOO gross!!!

Our cute helper {sorry my hand is doing weird things!}

Jake cleaning the floor to prep for the wood 

Hall after we vacuumed and pulled out all the staples {thank you to the Wall's for letting us use their shop vac!}

The next day, the cavalry arrived to start laying the floor. Because Kjell did his floor himself, he and Paige were our experts. They helped us SOOO much! Jake's dad came over for several hours too to help, and my sister Brynne & Blake spent all their free time for 3 or 4 days at our house. We had some AMAZING helpers!! 

Laying the longest strip 

Trying to get it just right 

The fireplace. It. was. a. nightmare. Jake's dad came up with the AWESOME idea to trace around the rock so that we could transfer the tracing to the laminate and then cut it with the saw so that the wood would perfectly fit. It worked like a charm but was hard to trace! 

Blake's nemesis - he did almost all of this closet and it had some AWKWARD cuts because the walls are not square and that's just a ridiculous closet

One of the cut outs from the fireplace 

We moved all our furniture into the kitchen for those couple days and I was dying at how disorganized and messy and cluttered it all was. This renovation made me realize how OCD I am! And I just love she's holding onto him. 

We got all this done in 1 day! Just a little short before the kitchen and missing the hallways. 

If you've ever put camping chairs in your living room for furniture, you might be a redneck. 

Jake working on the linen closet 

Hallway to the master/garage/laundry/basement almost done! 

Looking from the entry way {just missing the transition piece}

Got the area by the master/garage/basement/laundry room done! Just need the transition pieces 

Our garage looked like Home Depot threw up in it

Our cute supervisor

Finishing up - this was the last section we did 

Standing in Kaycee's room looking at the guest bedroom, Kaycee's bathroom and closets. ALL DONE!!! 

As soon as we were done, I swept and steam mopped the floor and we got to put the furniture back. I bought 3 new rugs at Wal-mart and got new curtains for the living room too and I love how it changed the feel of the room!

The finished empty floor before I vacuumed it {missing transition piece to the tile}

All done!!! Jake put the transition pieces in too

Standing in the kitchen 

The only thing we had left was to put on the quarter round. Typically when you put laminate down, you take the baseboards off and then put new ones on. Jake and I really didn't want to do that, which was one of our main hang ups for doing the floor. The salesman at Lumber Liquidators told us we could leave our baseboards and buy this quarter round stuff and use that instead and it would cover the little bit of a gap that you need to leave against the wall. We thought that sounded awesome and went that route instead of taking the baseboards off. Yeah, not so much. Taking the baseboards off would have made the cuts a LOT easier but hind sight is 20/20 right? We kept not working on the quarter round because there were a BAJILLION little corner 45 degree cuts and eventually we decided to get a price quote from a handy man everyone in our neighborhood recommends to see how much it would cost. He was so inexpensive so we decided to pay him to finish it up and we're VERY happy with that decision. He did an amazing job especially in all the corners and it would have taken us MUCH more time to do it ourselves then it takes for Jake to work some OT or for me to work a few extra hours at Telenotes to pay for his service. Work smarter, not harder.

Hallway with the quarter round 

Standing in the laundry room

Standing in the kitchen, that's the door to the backyard 

Standing in the guest bedroom 

Although it's been an incredibly hard, long process we absolutely love it! It feels like we got a new home without having to move, and it was MUCH cheaper than carpet. Cleaning it has been super easy too - we just run the vacuum over it when it looks super bad and otherwise I just mop it once every week or 2. Only part of the project left is to touch up the paint on the baseboards and paint the quarter round in a few spots where you can see the finish nails. Gotta love that there's always another project, right?  Again, huge thanks to Kjell, Paige, Brynne, Blake, Danny and of course my awesome Jake. He is so hard working and I am so grateful that I picked such an awesome guy to spend eternity with. Yay for our awesome floor!!