Installing Laminate Floors For Beginners

I’m SO excited to share the finished product of my latest project: replacing our old carpets with laminate floors. Mostly I’m just excited that this project is finished, period!

Ever since we moved into our house back in June, the carpets had been driving me crazy. It wasn’t so much the look—although they looked pretty rough—it was the smell. Think pet smell + old house smell + former smoker smell all rolled into one musty cloud. It was not pleasant, especially as the hot summer wore on.

We looked into having a professional install laminate floors, but between the materials and labor the estimate came in around $6,000—totally out of the question after our recent bathroom remodel. When I looked into the cost of just the supplies, though, things looked a lot more doable.

Based on my research, installing laminate floors is a pretty basic project that even a beginner can tackle. I had a friend who was planning a visit in August, and this was the perfect motivation I needed to bite the bullet and get the floors done.

Choosing A Laminate Floor

If you’re looking into laminate floors, you probably know there are thousands of options out there. It’s shocking when you realize you could pay as much for flooring as you could for a new car. But as I said above, we’re on a budget. I mostly just wanted something that would look better than the carpet, stand up to wear and tear and be easy to clean.

The contractor we worked with on our bathroom remodel mentioned a type of flooring available at Lowe’s for $0.99/square foot—that’s super inexpensive for laminate flooring. He told me he had installed it before and it seemed to be decent quality for the price. A quick search brought me to the Style Selections line, and sure enough there were a ton of different color options all for $0.99/square foot.

We went with the color Tavern Oak, which I would describe as a “blonde” colored wood. I could have stood for it to be a hint lighter, but overall I’m happy with the color we chose.

There are some negative reviews of this brand of laminate out there, but most of them had to do with the interlocking mechanism that locks the boards together. I ended up having an issue with this, too, but by the end of the first day of work I had figured out how to fix it. I’ll talk about this further down in the installation section of this post.

Prepping Your Floors For Laminate

Preparing our floors for the laminate installation was by far the most labor-intensive part of the project. When people say “installing laminate floors is so easy!”, I think it’s because they probably don’t have a lot of prep work to do. The installation is easy, but the prep part is a bitch.

First, we began by tearing up the old carpet and carpet pad in our bedroom, guest room and living room. There’s not much to it; you just grab a corner and pull it up. You’ll want to have a thick pair of work gloves for this, because there will be nails and staples all over the place. I have several pairs of these work gloves and they do the trick.

One the carpet was torn up, we were left with a mess of a floor.

To understand what you should expect when ripping up old carpet, it helps to understand how your house is constructed. Your house sits on a subfloor, which is typically made of wood or concrete. Your flooring, whether it’s carpet, tile, vinyl or something else, is installed on top of the subfloor, usually with some sort of barrier like a pad or moisture barrier in between.

Ideally, when installing laminate flooring, you should be working with a clear and level subfloor. If you’re in an older home, though, that’s almost never going to be the case. The house has lived through so many years and so many different types of flooring, the subfloor takes a beating!

For us, we found the subfloor in different conditions in the different rooms. Our bedroom, for example, was half covered in old vinyl tiles, while the other half was the original wood plank subfloor (which I was so tempted to restore and keep after seeing it!).

The guest room and living room were a mix of vinyl and wood underneath the carpet, too, and the living room had a slant where a wall had been removed. And of course, all of it had nails and staples leftover from where the carpet had been secured down.

Your job at this point is to make the surface as clear and level as possible. We used a pry bar, pliers and the backside of a hammer to pull up all the nails and staples we could. We hammered flat any that remained stuck in place.

I used drywall joint compound to fill in any big dents or gaps in the floorboards. I didn’t think this through very well and used regular joint compound, which takes 24 hours to dry and seriously slowed down our progress. If I were to do it again I’d use the quick-dry kind, which dries in about 90 minutes.

Finally, we put down laminate flooring underlayment, which helps cushion the laminate and reduce squeaking on your new floors. To install it, you simply lay it flat, cut it to fit the room and duct tape the sections together. (Note that some types of laminate flooring come with a pre-attached underlayment. These don’t require laying a separate one.)

Be sure to read my post on Tools For Installing A Laminate Floor, which covers every single tool and material I used in this project.

Installing Laminate Flooring

Now comes the fun part: installing your new laminate flooring. I’m not kidding–it’s a lot of fun. Once you get the hang of it, you can move through a room pretty quickly.

Use your longest uninterrupted wall (i.e. one without doors or corners) as a starting point. After placing your spacers against the wall per the instructions on your laminate, lay the first row of boards, interlocking the ends as you go.

I watched several videos that instructed laying the boards in a stair-like arrangement, like this:

I did this in the first room and almost immediately ran into problems with the boards not locking in place or staying put. I’m guessing there’s a reason they tell you to do it this way, but it was super tedious and frustrating.

Instead, in the second room I just laid one long row, followed by the next, like this:

It was much easier to get the boards to lock in place and stay put this way. Plus, you don’t have a ton of different sized boards to keep track of as you lay your pieces. You just lay full-length boards until you get to the end of the row, then cut the last one to fit. Use the leftover from the cut endpiece to start the next row, and continue on.

Another issue that I ran into was that I expected the boards to just lock into place perfectly every time. This doesn’t always happen. Some will have to be tapped into place, sometimes forcefully, using a rubber mallet and tapping block. Once I got into the habit of tapping every piece together, both along the sides and end-to-end, they fit much more snugly and I had far less problems getting the boards to lay flat and flush.

The most tedious part of the actual installation was cutting the irregular pieces, like the ones at the end of the room and the final row. These will need to be cut to fit.

You can cut laminate in several ways: with a circular saw, a table saw, a specialty saw, or a plain old hand saw, although I would not recommend the last option (your arm will fall off!). The thing to consider is that you will need to cut boards both lengthwise and crosswise, and not all saws can do both.

To make my life easier, I splurged on a special laminate flooring saw that’s designed specifically for this purpose. It can make both regular cuts (the ones that go across the board) and rip cuts (the lengthwise ones to make the board skinnier). I am so glad I bought this saw; I don’t think I ever could have done it using a standard table or circular saw.

They also have these really neat laminate cutters, which have a lever where you pull it and it cuts the board. This would have been awesome to have to avoid going outside for every single cut I needed to make (there’s way too much sawdust to use the saw inside). However, these laminate cutters can’t make rip cuts. Hence, I went with the saw that can do both, but if you can get your hands on a laminate cutter it would speed up the process even further.

The great thing about laminate flooring is that the edges don’t have to be perfect. As long as they’re within about a quarter-inch of the wall, they’ll be hidden by baseboards or quarter-round molding that you’ll install over the top at the very end of your project.

Installing Laminate On An Uneven Floor

OK, so remember that part where I said our subfloors were kind of uneven? Particularly a slanted spot in the living room?

A slant isn’t so bad if it’s just a uniform slant across the length of the room, like when an old house settles to one side. As long as the floor is still flat, the laminate will lay flat, just at a slight slant.

Our issue, though, was a peak in the middle of the room with lower spots on either side. Essentially, it’s a straight line across the room about six inches wide where a wall used to be. That area is about ½ inch higher than the rest of the floor. These types of high or low points in the middle of the room are a problem.

Technically, you should not lay laminate across a floor with high or low points. The laminate bends, putting it at risk of cracking, and at a certain point it becomes impossible to get the boards to lock properly. To demonstrate, I made this neat illustration:

The correct thing to do in this scenario is to either lay a new plywood subfloor that’s level all the way across, or to use self-leveling underlayment to level the entire room.

…No thanks.

The bump in my floor wasn’t that dramatic, and leveling it would have added at least $500 to the budget and a whole lot of headache, so I decided to go ahead and lay the floor over it anyway.

Do as I say, not as I do!

I feel like I’m giving irresponsible advice here, but it’s the reality of what I did and I want to share that so you can make an informed decision about your own project.

When I got to the bump in the floor, I faced what you might expect: the full-length boards could bend a little bit, but not enough to accommodate the bump. However, if I used smaller sections of board, the angle wasn’t quite as severe and they could be laid to fit, like this:

So, that’s exactly what I did. It took forever to cut all the extra, smaller pieces to fit just right, but to be honest I’m surprised how well it turned out.

You can see the transition, but if you’re not looking for it it’s barely noticeable. Plus, I know this area will probably be covered by a rug eventually, so I wasn’t too concerned about it.

If you’re a perfectionist or you want to ensure the absolute integrity of your floors, definitely do things the proper way and level the floor first. But if you’re like me and can live with a little imperfection in exchange for a pretty significant cost and time savings, you might be able to get away with laying laminate over a floor that’s not perfectly flat.

Laminate Floor Installation Cost

Finally, the cost of installing our laminate flooring. All said and done, we came out at just over $1,400, which is so much more reasonable than the $6,000 we were quoted for the job.

To see how the costs broke down for this project, view my spreadsheet here.

Since we had no idea how long it would take to finish this project, we did one room at a time instead of ripping up everything at once. Overall it took one whole weekend, plus 2-3 more nights after work to finish all three rooms. I’m still finishing the transitions, mainly because I just needed a break for a few days.

Though it took some legwork—seriously, after getting up and down from the floor to the saw 1,000 times, my thighs were aching!—I’m so pleased with how our floors turned out. They look great, and best of all, that moldy ‘old house smell’ from the carpets is gone.

Don’t forget, you can see the full list of tools you’ll need for your own laminate installation project in this post.

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