We needed a new floor upstairs. We had carpet and my daughter and I have horrible allergies. We checked out the prices for new hardwood floors and decided we could do it ourselves for half the price. It was time to save some money and change the floor from carpet to wood.
Preparations – We had to measure each room to see how much wood we needed to buy. I jotted the figures down in my notebook and we added a few square feet on to the total to make sure we would buy enough floor. Now I had to find the best place to buy hardwood flooring.
I checked the prices for wood flooring at Lowes and Home Depot. The prices were a bit high, so I made a search on the internet and found Lumber Liquidators. I took a trip out to Lumber Liquidators with my figures and we saved nearly forty percent on the flooring. Now I had to buy the tools to put the wood floor in.
I drove back to Home Depot and picked up a combination deal on two saws and a nail gun. I also bought a few other tools I needed to put in my wood floor. I rented a truck at the Home Depot for less than forty dollars for two hours of time. I picked up the wood flooring which was already padded. All of this work took me half a day, but now I was ready to put in my new floor.
Preparing the Floor – Two family members helped me with the work and this also saved me some money on my new floor. We cut and tore out the old carpet. We took out the old padding and remarked about how the builders hid a ton of trash under our carpet. We took out the tack boards carefully because we did not want to cut up our hands. We took all of the old carpet and put it by the road. Luckily for us, somebody took it away for free. We also put all of the padding and tack boards in the trash. We swept up all of the floors and finally were ready to put in the new hardwood floor.
Installing The New Hardwood Floors – Installing Hardwood floors is pretty simple. If you are relatively smart, you can learn the process in fifteen minutes. You have three sizes of floor. You measure the flooring to fit the floor and line each piece up. You put your floor together like a puzzle, making sure you have different size pieces in each row of flooring. One or two men can work together tapping the flooring in, while the other guy measures and cuts the pieces of wood. If you have a forth guy, he can measure and cut the trim.
The hardwood floor took us a day and a half to finish. Installing the hardwood flooring was easy, but you have to move furniture from room to room. We had to install three rooms and one hallway which turned out to be around 700 hundred square feet of hardwood flooring. Installing the floor around doors, closets and stairs was tedious.
The Results – It took three men two days to put in the hardwood floor. We paid $2700 dollars for the hardwood floor, tools and truck rental. If we had professional installers put in the same hardwood flooring for us, we would have paid more than five thousand dollars. Our hardwood floor looks great because we did a great job. The hardwood flooring went into my personal house and I made sure I did everything correctly. Two years before, we had professionals put a hardwood floor in our living room and hallway and that floor is not nearly as nice as the floor we installed. The installers did not take the same care we took as we installed my new hardwood floors upstairs. If you want to save money on a new hardwood floor, do it yourself like we did. You will be proud of the job you did, you will have a beautiful new hardwood floor and you will have money left in your bank account.
Source:
Personal experience
Lumberliquidators.com
Lowes
The Home Depot