Step 3: Flooring

Farewell old floor. Hello cute new rug.

I discussed and debated what kind of flooring to buy.  This was going to be the most expensive, and most scary since we wanted to do it ourselves.  I first thought, laminate.  It's the most inexpensive, it looks like wood, you can buy brands that just lock themselves into place. Niice.  The only setbacks, we'd have to buy a saw to cut to fit certain pieces, and sometimes they bubble up when water gets into the cracks, the base of them (according to some reviews) aren't much more than cardboard.
  Then I was talking to my mom, and she'd mentioned that my brother Ben had just redone his in-laws' floors with this beautiful waterproof laminate that was all plastic.  Say wahhht?

I thought this would be perfect because we wanted to extend the same floor into the kitchen, so I researched this magical waterproof laminate.  Turns out that it wasn't laminate at all, it was fine vinyl plank flooring. I thought italics seemed appropriate with such a fancy description.  So we kept searching Lowe's trying to find a deal with one we liked. It was still more than I wanted to pay, more than $2 a sq foot. Then Brian suggested we branch out to Home Depot in Cedar Rapids, and wallah. Some beautiful light flooring to brighten up the basement for $1.69 a sq ft.

We learned about how to install on YouTube and with a little old-fashioned trial and error. We loved that you just needed one stroke from an exact-o-knife and then they snap in two. Also, you just had to stick the adhesives together, sometimes easier said then done to get them perfectly straight. We have a few little gaps, but not noticeable enough for us to care anymore. We did care at first, because we wanted to do a professional job, but now its all good!

 We came up with a natural non-matchy-matchy pattern and HIT THE FLO!

 Didn't get much crack, but it did break our backs after two days of bending over like that. I don't know how people make a living doing this kind of labor.

 The girls just hung out playing and watching movies while we worked. It improved the look of the whole place!  This was by far, the most noticeable change to downstairs.  Okay, maybe emptying it completely was too.