Looking to do a couple rooms in the house. I am looking to go over the top of my existing hardwood. Most likely leaning towards pergo. Anyone have any recommendations/comments as to where to purchase flooring??? Rooms are roughly 144 square feet.
You’re putting fake wood on top of real wood?
^word… Lumber Liquidators.
Are you doing all the work yourself?
Refinish the real wood. Really the only way to go IMO.
Refinish is first suggestion. If you are going over, go to Lumber Liquidators and look at floating real wood engineered flooring. Cost effective, easy to install, real wood. I’ve done a few. Stay away from Pro Source in Cheektowaga.
Lumber Liquidators Sends me an e-mail every other day about shit I don’t care about.
They where the best priced, and easy to deal with though.
I went with Pergo XP for my living/bed rooms. Came out to about 600sq/ft (which is 80% of my house)
I wanted to be able to pick it up in case my floor decided to move in the coming winters. Tore all the floor joists out and put down new ones w/ jacks… Figured It’s easy to lift back up the plywood and fix whatever heaves since I don’t have a crawlspace. The house foundation is a single row of cinder blocks, so it’s only a few inches off the ground.
Anyway, it was fairly cheap. Very easy to put together, much easier than a hard wood floor. I helped my dad put down about 1ksq/ft of hardwood in his house many years back, that was amazing painful.
I used some of the scrap cutoffs to see how it actually holds up to damage/scratching… and it’s actually very very VERY impressive. Better than a typical oak hardwood I’d say. I was incredibly surprised. When it does chip though, it seems like you’re pretty fucked though because it’s just MDF underneath. There’s goop you can put on it to patch it up and fix it though to make it look like new. Water on the floor is a big no no, as it is with hardwood.
If you have hardwood, I’d refinish it honestly…
But if you really want Pergo, I had a great time doing Pergo XP flooring. I didn’t use the regular Pergo floor so I can’t say much about that.
It was a little tricky getting the hang of how to lay it down, but once you know what you’re doing you can fly through it. There’s also repeating patterns which I don’t really like… But I think once you cover the floor you don’t notice it as much. The grain isn’t all random like hardwood… So a lot of the boards are repeated, and you can see the same thing scattered throughout the floor. It looked really awkward when I finished seeing the big open floor like that. But once the couch got put in there it didn’t look as noticeable. We’ll see over time if I forget about it or not.
edit;
Since I came from a house with a hardwood floor… I can absolutely tell it’s not real hardwood. However if you aren’t very familiar with hardwood, I think it’s very possible to think it’s hardwood. The flooring is textured, so even the reflections are more realistic…
Well for starters the wife and I do not like the style of hardwood currently in the rooms. Also, the hardwood floors have random holes in them for whatever reason the owners prior to us did.
Only reason we plan on going with the Pergo flooring is because of the fact that we currently have Pergo throughout the house. So, we want the floors to be “level” and not have a difference between rooms throughout the house. I was looking at Lumber Liquidators, but thought I would get some recommendations here.
Also, I plan on installing the flooring myself.
Installation fairly easy for beginners. Just have to watch areas where things get tight (door jambs, closets, etc.) Eats up saw blades pretty good too.
a little tip I learned when I did my own pergo, Def get the spacer kit and rubber blocks/hammer,secondly when you get the packs of pergo open all of them up and mix all the different packages together, different packages will have slightly different color/grain patterns . Also let all the open mixed packages sit in the room you plan on installing them in for 24 hours to expand/shrink according to the temperature conditions in that specific room. Good luck!
Hire 1QIKZ, he’s the bomb…
interesting… will have to keep that in mind…
Also, the room I am working in now has no molding or casing… so installation should be pretty simple. The only thing that I had in mind is keep the floor in sync with the hallway (keeping it all parallel) and leave a little gap from the walls. But I’m almost certain I will be purchasing the flooring from LL. Anyone else have good/bad/ugly experience with them? Quality of products etc…
No problems with LL to date. If you’re going up to the existing baseboard, you’ll need a shoe moulding to match the flooring or your existing baseboard finish. Shoe is typically 1/2" thick so keep that in mind when laying your floor.Being that it’s summer and humidity is up your gap does not have to be huge, it will only shrink in winter.
I bought my hardwoods for the upstairs of my house from LL. It is a utility grade hardwood (the real kind, no laminate here). The grade I got is lower end, which means it’s imperfect looking (which I prefer due to Rustic style home). Purchasing was fine. They helped me load it up. No real issues, and at $1.66/sqft for real hardwoods I was ecstatic.
Same thing in my house. Also called # 2 or “Tavern” grade. Some pieces were unusable by few and far between. A different look, more rustic or country. Installation of 3/4 hardwood is no joke though. Falls right in there with roofing, especially if you’re doing it yourself.
Last 2 floors ive done (im pretty sure about 90% of the time we get them from there, as far as wood/laminate ) has been from LL. No problems. You’re always bound to get some sort of junk pieces. Mix them all up , i usually just have 2 boxes open at once while putting it down. Get the spacers/bars/block for beating to snap into place. Let it sit in the house for a day-2days as said.
it’s fairly simple.
Pics?
I am planning to do one room in the near future.
what do you guys prefer in cutting the pieces??? miter saw??? circular??
I can take pics of mine and post it in a few days.
I used a miter saw. You want to make sure you get nice square ends.