Learning plank

So we are moving forward with the house building. The county are making us demo our current house before we start on the new house. We are making slow headway with installing the new water and power lines, more on that in a later post.

With our current house getting ready for demo we will be moving into a 32ft trailer. Its actually really nice for a trailer with a separate bathroom, big bedroom, two La-Z-Boy recliners in the pop-out (that is RV talk for little bump out) and HEAT!! Which I am really excited about, it will be much warmer than our current house this winter.

I decided to do a few upgrades to the trailer, one of which was install new flooring to replace the carpet. Nothing worse than someone else's carpeting. So I looked for the cheapest laminated hardwood stuff out there as a) its a trailer and b) this was my first foray into laying hardwood floor so I knew there would be a learning curve, or plank.

We found this stuff at Costco and at $1.56/sqft it was financially ridiculously doable and destroy-able should the effort go array. We chose Golden Aspen color as it was light and you wouldn't want anything too dark and heavy in a little space like a trailer.

This stuff is a floating floor and it clicks into place on both the long and short sides. Sounds easy enough. Of course fitting this into a trailer meant that after all said and done, there were only 2 boards that didn't require ANY cuts of any kind. Phew, a lot of cuts, angles, re-cuts, re-measuring, cursing, cutting the wrong side, more cursing, re-measuring, re-cutting and running to Costco to buy another box.

I will say I tried hard to utilize my skills of efficient resource usage to minimize how much I would need and use. Which was going well until I realized these guys have you over a barrel.

You can see here how they click in place so there are overlap edges and underlap edges. So as you move and cut this design forces you to use a new board for EVERY cut. So if you have a board that you cut in half to fit into a spot, you cannot use the rest of that board because it now doesn't have the correct form on the top. So they trap you into buying A LOT more boards than you would need and leaving you with an immense amount of waste. NEVER again. A complete waste and very disappointing. The only redeeming quality is its CARB compliant and made of 74% pre-consumer recycled material. Look at all this waste, whole box!

The other issue is that it ruined 2 saw blades making the cuts, should have used the tile cutter after scoring. Needless to say Kyle wasn't happy when he went to cut a thick piece of wood for his project and the blade started smoking....Ooops.

The floor does look good. I added quarter round on the edges which finishes it well. I spray painted the registers using Oiled Rubbed Bronze Spray Paint by Krylon. It will be much easier to keep clean. I started in the bedroom and you can see some of my mistakes but I learned a lot in the process and by the end really go the hang of it and was utilizing some other tools to perfect my cuts, angles, edges and seams.