I really need to catch up to current events, but I didn’t want to skip this one…
So a few weeks ago, I had the opportunity to help a friend from church install laminate flooring. We were helping out because another member of the church was dealing with life-threatening asthma in one of his children, and needed to get all the carpet out of the house ASAP.
None of that really matters, except to set the scene for why I was standing outside a house somewhere in Des Moines at 8AM on a Saturday, getting ready to work with a carpenter to install some flooring. The only detail is that neither myself, the home owner, or the guy who brought the majority of the tools had ever done laminate flooring before.
It turns out it isn’t that hard, although I am sure it helps when you are under the guidance of somebody who does quality woodwork on a daily basis. While not being really hard, it was time consuming. We finished two rooms a hallway and a staircase over the course of a day, but it took roughly thirteen hours to finish.
I would put a picture in here, except the only picture I took was of the miter saw, and I am guessing you have seen one of those before.
A few takeaways from the day:
- Laminate flooring is surprisingly straight forward to install.
- There are some specialized tools just for sliding the slats around with that are lifesavers
- Having a good miter saw, and a good table saw also made a huge difference
- (Sub note) I don’t work with those kinds of tools every day, but I have enough to be comfortable with them… watching the homeowner operate a saw was at times heart-stoppingly alarming
- Estimating the needed materials to finish a job is hard
- And… A final note (because this was written after the fact) It only took four days for my legs and back to loosen up enough so I could walk normally 🙂
Helping out was great for a number of reasons, not the least of which was learning how to install the flooring, but in the end it was fun just to get to swing a hammer and run a saw… Not something I manage too often these days.
-Jordan
Nelsons 