Unskilled Couple Tackle Hardwood Floor and Live to Dance on It

After you’ve read a few remodeling success stories, you start to notice certain similarities among them. The Happy Remodelers either have a lot of money, or a lot of home-improvement talent.

We, unfortunately, have missed out on both counts. Not only do we lack the funds to hire professionals, but we are handicapped by an embarrassing dearth of technical skill.

Still, once in a great while, we, too, have a success story, and this is one--in which we undertook a project involving a product we’d never heard of, requiring skills we’d never even considered developing, and with results so astounding we still can’t believe we did it.

Naturally, we hadn’t lived in our ranch-style tract home for eight years without becoming at least nodding acquaintances with Home Depot and Sunset how-to books. We’d painted, wallpapered, laid a peel-and-stick linoleum kitchen floor, and even installed crown molding in our bedroom (though recently a knowledgeable acquaintance pointed out tactfully that we had installed it upside down). We’d acquired experience but no expertise, and were wary of any home-improvement project.

Still, every homeowner knows that even if you don’t go looking for projects, they’ll come looking for you. Our house had come with a hideous orange-pink carpet, and time, wear and animal hair had taken their toll.

“What color do you call that?” visitors would ask, squinting at the carpet. We knew we would need something new, and preferably attractive this time, to replace it.

I had been reading too many Happy Remodeler stories and wanted hardwood floors. My husband, maddeningly logical, pointed out that hardwood was expensive to buy and hard to install, and that our dogs would quickly ruin the finish. Nevertheless, I argued, our past experience with carpet proved it no easier to maintain. Every option seemed unworkable, and the carpet sat, getting more and more unsavory, while we dithered and dallied.

A possible solution to our stalemate appeared when we were wandering through Ikea in Burbank. I had been pointedly admiring a display of hardwood floor, when I noticed that one type, though it appeared to be hardwood, was actually a laminate product that promised to be impervious to scratches. Tundra, as it was called, was also cheaper than hardwood, and--wonder of wonders--Ikea promised that if you couldn’t lay the floor, they would refund your money!

I pulled Ian over excitedly, where he cast a typically skeptical eye over the display. “Impervious to scratches,” I read to him insistently.

“100-pound Malamut scratches?” he asked, not convinced.

Just then a slender, attractive woman pulled up a cart to the display and began gaily tossing in packages of the Tundra flooring. Noticing our interest, she chattered to us about how she and her husband had installed a dining room floor just yesterday afternoon, and the results were so fabulous that they were going to do the playroom today.

Not only was it easy, she went on, but they had found that it was completely resistant to scratches--even their 120-pound Malamute had been unable to scratch it! She finished loading her cart and sped off with a cheery wave.

Galvanized by what seemed to be a Sign From Above, we, too, loaded up our cart with flooring and headed home, where we contemplated the task at hand.

The alarmingly brief brochure provided by Ikea outlined the basic steps. You put down the plastic foil which acts as a moisture barrier, cutting to fit, and on top of that you lay the plastic foam. The boards are then laid by applying glue to the end groove of a board, fitting the tongue of the next board into it, and pushing them together.

When the first row is laid, you check the alignment using a string line, then lay the next row, applying glue to the side and end groove, fitting boards in place by tapping with the chisel and hammer or mini-crowbar (which Ikea is happy to sell you in a little tool kit). You then proceed in this fashion, doggedly gluing and fitting, until you’re done.

Sounds simple--and it actually is, in fact. What it isn’t is speedy. It took two days to get halfway across the living room. Toward the end of the second day, I asked Ian incredulously, “Did that woman say they did a room in one afternoon? “

“I think she must have been a shill,” he said dourly.

Over the next week or so, working at odd spare moments, we managed to do most of the room. Progress was considerably impeded when we got into the hallway, due to the fact that the walls are quite uneven. Day after day was spent fitting the boards meticulously to the walls and around the door moldings. At last, a typical three weeks after beginning the project, the floor was finished.

The final analysis? Well, first, the good parts: Aesthetically, it’s spectacular. Indistinguishable from real wood, it has changed the whole look and feel of the room to a lighter, cleaner, more modern one. Maintenance is a breeze. It actually is unscratchable--we accidentally pulled the sharp end of a crowbar across a board while installing it, and it left no mark. Spills are no problem--it has resisted even white gas and paint remover.

The bad parts: it’s a fairly tedious and slow process. Walls that are not true (and whose are?) complicate the process. The help at the local Ikea branch, while cheerful, is not at all knowledgeable, and unable to answer any technical questions or solve problems. Finding the finishing touches (molding, thresholds) to match can be a problem, especially if you choose the light pine finish, as we did. (We finally had to have thresholds made of ash and stained).

While the floor can’t be scratched, it can be broken, if something heavy enough and sharp enough is dropped on it. Fortunately, individual boards can be removed and replaced. Finally, while Ikea does sell an installation kit for the person totally bereft of tools, using the handsaw provided in the kit to make cuts for doors could add days to the task. A power saw made this part of the job infinitely easier for us.

The final cost of the project was $1,300, to cover approximately 450 square feet of floor. The end result is visually stunning and completely changes the character of the room. Plus, now we have all this acquired floor-laying talent--not Happy Remodelers, perhaps, but certainly satisfied ones.

Ian says he’ll never lay another floor, but lately I’ve been thinking how much nicer the bedroom would look with a lovely pine Tundra floor in there. . . .