Before I begin this is not a sponsored post. This coronavirus quarantine really has me bored at home. I’ll be honest I have been still going out but just walking and to the store. I sanitize my hands as often as possible, wear my mask, and social distance. If you follow me on Instagram then you know those are the things I’ve been up to. But I want to come out of this questions and have accomplished something. So I set out to find a project to do at home.
The project I settled on was redoing the living room floor. We have been in our home for 15 years. In those years, we have needed to get next day carpet installation for our bedrooms after our dog destroyed the upstairs while we were away from home. Our bathrooms have been retiled. And our kitchen has had new vinyl installed. But we’ve never changed our living room floor and it was time to do something about that. Only thing is I didn’t really want to pay anyone to do it. That’s the easy way out. I mean I put some serious thought into it and decided that I wanted to try to do the floor myself. I enlisted the help of my son Tyler. So, while looking around on the Internet for ideas, I found stone flooring that is trendy and can be found from companies like Westminster Stone. This could give the living room a rustic chic look or a modern style. As of now, I am sticking to my plan by doing the flooring on my own.
I knew I didn’t want to spend a lot of money on this project. Last time we got a quote for doing our flooring we were quoted a little over $800. My goal was to do it for under that. I knew I didn’t want to spend more than $400. Definitely not $800. I headed to the Home Depot website to see what I could find. I knew I wanted to do peel & stick tile so I went to see what kind of flooring I could find. I found Chaucer tile which was $0.42 per square but in a box it was $18.90 per case. I got 8 cases the first time. One thing I love about Home Depot is if they run out of something or don’t have it they will refund your money. So I only got 4 cases because they didn’t have 8. So I got refunded for the other 4 boxes. We wound up having to go back and get more adhesive. I was going to buy some from a website like sugru.com glue, but I was in a rush so I had to run to the DIY store. Because uhm… the one we first got was way smaller than we thought it was. It was a one quart container. We also had to go back and get more tiles since they didn’t give us all the ones we needed. What I love about going to Home Depot is that the employees are very helpful. They helped us find the things that we needed. It was suggested that we use spray adhesive. So we tried that until we ran out and then decided to go back to regular flooring adhesive.
This project was really easy to do. We just did the following things
- We measured the living room to determine the number of cases of tiles we needed.
- We swept the floor to clear it off any dust or trash that could be on the floor z
- We applied adhesive to each area that we wanted to lay tile on. We decided to go square by square.
- We laid down each tile.
- For areas near the wall we actually cut the tile to fit.
- After we finished we waited 48 hours for it to dry and then mopped the floor. It was pretty sticky when we finished.
The whole project took us about 3 weeks to do. Tyler and I worked on it as often as we could. The biggest obstacle was my work schedule. I would come home and we would do as much as we could do. We also did it in sections giving each section time to dry. YouTube videos really helped out a lot. We went there to find out exactly how to do it. In the end, we loved the results. I’ve been considering carpeting in my living room as well, but I’m worried that the dogs would wreck it like they did last time. One of my friends suggested that I could get help from companies like Carpet Cleaning Pros (in case the dogs mess it up) to clean the carpets. Now that the flooring is done, I’m going to try to do as much of the rest of the house myself.
I have to tell you I rather enjoyed this time with Tyler. We would listen to music, talk, or just be silent. We couldn’t wait to see the results of our hard work so we kept at it. We really worked well together. In the end we wound up with an amazing looking floor. I honestly didn’t think it would turn out as well as it did. What makes this project even better than us doing it ourselves is the fact that we saved about $400. The project was a total of $389.
