Laminate Flooring: Making the Right Choice

By Jonathan Berohn

One of the best ways to really jazz up a room is to install hardwood flooring. Unfortunately, it’s also one of the more expensive—and potentially more difficult. Happily enough, there’s a relatively inexpensive and fairly easy way to get much the same effect—laminate flooring.

Now, when I say easy, it’s not fall-out-of bed easy, but installing laminate flooring is certainly a do-it-yourself project that anyone who is moderately handy with power tools can manage without too much difficulty. Laminate flooring also has the added benefit of durability. It resists surface damage even better than wood.

Choices, Choices, Choices

One of the additional benefits of laminate flooring is that you can choose from a wide variety of styles. The most common looks are various shades and types of wood. You can also opt for laminate flooring that looks like tile. Again you can select from a wide variety of colors. One thing to make sure to look for is flooring that is also textured. Yes, you can buy untextured laminates more cheaply than you can buy textured laminates, but the extra cost is well worth it here. Not only does the texture cut down on slipping, and add a more realistic feel to your floor, but the texture also adds to the visual appeal. The untextured laminates tend to reflect light more like a mirror than like wood or tile—certainly not the look I’m after.

Picking the Right One

The best way to pick laminate flooring is in person. I’d suggest you go down to your local hardware or home store and check out what they have to offer. That’s not to say you can’t do some research ahead of time. Two manufacturer sites that are helpful are Pergo and Shaw Flooring. Both sites let you browse through styles and colors to help you narrow your choice. Once you have some idea of what you are looking for, your local store will probably have samples you can take home to compare with your décor.

As I said, you can buy laminate flooring at most hardware and home stores. You can also naturally buy it at flooring stores. The manufacturer web sites also have links to help you find local retailers.

Installing Laminate

Unfortunately, picking out and buying your laminate flooring is the easy part. While installation certainly isn’t rocket science, it will take you a while.  If you really are morally opposed to do-it-yourself projects, most retailers either offer installation or will refer you to someone who does (all for a fee, of course).  That said, this really is a project most people won’t have much trouble with.

The Right Tools

The best tool you can buy for this project is the instructional video.  Ordinarily I pass on these sorts of things (male stubbornness, and all), but the video I bought from Home Depot really came in handy.  The instructions that come in the packages are reasonably easy to decipher, but they don’t tell you much about the specialty pieces such as door edge strips and stair nose caps.  The video fills in the missing information.  I’d also recommend the do-it-yourself installation kit.  It comes with the spacers you need to lay the floor as well as a pulling tool that is useful for snapping in tight pieces.  You’ll also need to pick up some carbide blades for your jigsaw and/or circular saw.  Speaking of power tools, I’d recommend using, at minimum, a miter saw and a jigsaw.  A table saw comes in handy for ripping long pieces, but you can certainly get by without one—I did.

The Installation

The first thing you need to do is make sure your floor is level.  If you have any low spots you can use a floor-leveling compound to smooth things out.  Then you roll out the underlayer and get to the fun part.  Again, the combination of the video and the instructions makes things fairly simple.  The key to remember is to try to keep your boards about 1/4 inch from the wall, and make sure you use caulk or a sealant around the entire floor if you are installing it in a kitchen or bathroom.

The main thing to keep in mind before you start, though, is that the 3-5 hours they claim installation will take is a complete fantasy.  OK—maybe if your room is perfectly square, but my kitchen took a good 12 hours from start to finish.  Granted, I’m no Norm from PBS, but at least I managed not to cut my fingers off.