I know I’ve been talking about it for a while, but I’ve finally gotten around to installing the Pergo Laminate Hardwood Flooring in my office. It was just as easy as I expected but took a little more preparation than I had planned for and there were some additional expenses.
For this project I enlisted the help of my friend Kevin. Earlier this year we (and when I say we, I pretty much mean he) glued down hardwood bamboo floors in his condo. I didn’t want to go the glue down route because it just seems so permanent and, quite frankly, a much bigger hassle than the free floating, snap together Pergo floors.
The longest part of the entire process was waiting for the order to come in. If you plan on picking up some flooring and getting the project done that day or that week you might want to double check with the retailer. I had to wait about three weeks for the material to arrive and at that point it's considered a special order so returning extra wood came with a restocking fee. Luckily, I had measured well and, even though I had almost a box extra, I didn’t have a complete spare box so I had nothing to return. The rule of thumb is measure your floor space and convert to square footage and then add 10%.
With free floating flooring you need some additional supplies. There is an underlayment you must purchase. I was told it was 100 square feet a roll, my office is just over 120 square feet and it took almost 2 entire rolls. So you might want to buy more and return this if you don’t use it all. Home Depot keeps this in stock so there is no extra fee for returns. There are different types of underlayment and you can choose the level of “protection” you want. I went pretty cheap.
Then you need some spacers to make sure the floor is about a quarter inch from the walls. There is a spacer kit that I recommend buying, it comes with a pull bar tool which is very useful and a sort of pad thing that you can use if you’re going to try and hammer (I used a rubber mallet to further prevent breakage) the pieces into place. But there are not even close to enough spacers in this kit so pick up some extras. When you’re all done you can remove them so if you have a friend who just put in their own hardwood floors you could borrow theirs.
The first step, after the carpet is gone and you’ve removed the baseboards, is to lay a strip of underlayment. Just do one strip at a time, don’t try to do the whole room because it moves and can be slippery. Then, you want to run your wood in the same direction that traffic moves. But that’s just a general rule of thumb. You can decide which way you want to go.
Before you lay your first piece of wood, you need to cut off the snap-together part along the long and short edges. The pieces that go against the walls should be smooth and not have the connections. You’ll need a table saw for the long ones and you’ll need it when you finish. The rest of the pieces will need to be cut with a chop (miter) saw. I rented a large one because the one we had wouldn’t accommodate the width of the boards.
The first piece went into a corner. We decided not to start with a whole board but instead cut it. Then we began snapping them together, sort of like legos. You snap the short sides together on the first row and when you come to your last piece, measure and cut on the chop saw and then snap into place. Remember to use your spacers and keep a clear quarter inch around every wall. It’s really that easy.
The next row gets a little trickier because you have to snap the wood together on the short ends first and then the long sides get snapped to the previous row. And this is why two people is optimum. While you’re snapping one end together the others tend to come a little loose, so having someone hold while someone snaps and taps works pretty well. Then the rows sort of lay into place.
The final row is a bit tricky because the width of the board is probably not equal to the remaining space you have. So you’ll need to measure it (remember that open quarter inch) and then use a table saw again to rip down the middle of these boards. Installing this last row isn’t as difficult as it seems if you use the metal pry bar that comes in the kit I mentioned before.
Now, my office has a closet, so some tricky cuts were necessary and Kevin used a jigsaw for them. You may need to do this too, depending upon your room shape and the doorways.
A point to mention here, I have some items to return to the hardware store. I was told that I’d need some special saw blades so I bought ones for the table saw, the chop saw and the jigsaw and never needed any of them. Luckily, the rented chop saw came with the right blade so there wasn’t a problem there and the other blades from the borrowed tools worked just fine.
I love my floor and think it looks great, although there is still a lot of work to be done in the room, but to put it in perspective, the painting will take longer than the floors did. And Kevin and I have only done this twice now, so basically anyone can install a Pergo Laminate Hardwood floor.
