Kitchen Floor Day 2: Installation

Putting down the plywood was a heck of a lot easier than pulling up the old. A couple of cuts to deal with the borders of the floor (such as the hall which meets at an angle), and we had half the floor done! Some minor cutting for notches, but mostly we were all set.

The one place which was not so straight-forward was along the cabinets. Because of the wild cutting tool we used, there were some places it was not very straight-cut, and I wasn't about to try and trim any more with it after surviving the first round with fingers intact. Also, the dishwasher presented a problem because it stuck out further than the cabinets, and also had lots of loose wires dangling (which I didn't want to slice with the drill-saw). So, we had to cut that a bit more ragged. To fit the plywood we scribed the not-so-regular edge and cut to fit (calling upon Dave's experience with such things). What resulted was a pretty funky looking edge on the plywood, but a nice fit with the existing edge.

After the plywood was done, on to the new flooring! Our selection was a Beech finish Pergo. For those not familiar with the name, Pergo is a laminate - made up of many layers, including a photograph of real wood grain and many clear layers above. It comes in boxes of planks which are about 50 inches by 6 inches and about 1/4 inch thick. Each edge has either a slot or groove of very interesting design, and you lay the floor by interlocking pieces like a puzzle, and it floats over the subfloor. Not nailing, gluing, or anything. It sits atop a layer of foam called the underlayment which is also a sound barrier and helps it sit flat. This stuff is one of the best engineered things I have had the pleasure to work with. There was 1 piece with a single flaw (a black stripe running down it) in the 7 boxes we used. Even though it is 1/4 inch thick, it was undamaged by falls down the steps of the deck and other rough handling, and was solid when layed down. Even only 2 rows of planks was not going to move anywhere, and you couldn't fit the blade of a scalpel in where the planks meet. I am impressed with it. And, aside from cutting bits for the ends of the rows, it lays as quickly as building a house from Legos. You could pull up and re-set the entire floor in about 20 minutes once you have all the pieces cut to size and organized.

Once we got the hang of the insert-twist-snap installation, and got past the place where we needed a lot of cutting, we made good time laying the floor. We knocked off early with just the last row to do. It was going to be a bit of a pain because of the ragged edge of the cabinets again. Besides, we had bought one box too little of the Pergo (all we really needed was 2 more pieces, but they don't sell them singly). We figured we'd take stock of what we needed for trim and go get it with the last box the next morning.