Here’s the deal. When we bought this house, we were a tad bit naive. We sat down, made a list, and we decided it would officially take us thirty days to accomplish all of the necessities. I can literally laugh out loud just thinking about it. It ended up taking us 3 1/2 months to make it somewhat livable, and that was with about 20 extra hands, because we were in over our heads.
When we finally moved in, all of our flooring on the main level was ripped up and I was a lovely 36 weeks pregnant. With each passing day, our original to-do list grew, and we realized that our budget was growing smaller. So, we decided we had to throw out our beautiful engineered hardwood floor plans, until further notice.
That’s when I came across some SUPER cheap flooring at Menards. So get this. Normally, this laminate flooring is 98 cents/ square foot. However, it was on sale. ALSO, if you go to Menards, you know that they run a frequent 11% off of EVERYTHING sale. Menards is cheap as it is. Then, when they run that sale, it’s amazing, because you get an additional 11% off of sale stuff too!! So anyways, we got 11% off of all of the flooring we bought, and it came with free underlayment (foam-like material, will touch on this later). So, we paid a whopping $1,505.00 for all of the flooring, for our whole main level. Based on the pics above, we felt like we didn’t want to live on the floors, because of the grotesque state they were in and we wanted an alternative, cheap, easy option. This was it!
One thing we would have done differently, is upgraded to a nicer underlayment, if possible. The underlayment that we got was free, but we now know why. It wasn’t super thick, and it has caused our floors to shift a bit, but in the grand scheme of things, we aren’t too bothered by it. Our plan is to live on these floors for the next 5-10 years, until we have enough saved up for our hardwoods.
Our friend John, (Heaven-send) , helped Grant start this floor, and taught him how to master the pattern in the floor. Before we installed the floor, I thought you could just snap the boards in and call it good. Well, we learned that you usually want to pick a pattern, so that it looks really uniform throughout. We went with a specific “stair-step” pattern. Once you start a pattern, there is a certain logic to making sure it all aligns and Grant did a superb job. Installing a floor takes a REAL good miter saw, a ton of cuts around walls, islands, cabinets, and a LOT of prayer.
Moral of the story, we are happy with these floors, and for how affordable they are, we would recommend to anyone! Here’s a list of our pros and cons below:
Pros-Cheap; Look nice; Easy to clean; Easy to cut
Cons-They do feel pretty cheap on your feet compared to nice, sturdy hardwoods; You can see some faint grain lines in the wood that make it definitely look like laminate; The boards are somewhat thin so if your floors aren’t level you can definitely feel the movement
This week, Menards is running an 11% off sale, in our area, right now. Feel free to check out the sale if you need anything for your home!
Have a great week buds!
XO
Jenna