Quitters

When it comes to tackling home improvement projects, I am usually a "stick with it until it is done, even if it really sucks" kind of gal.

Chris is not so much that kind of gal guy.

He is the "if it is harder than we thought, we should quit and call in a professional" kind of guy.

Sometimes, my willpower loses out to his willpower and we end up quitting a project.

I hate to admit it, but we are quitters.

We have a rental house that needed a new laundry room floor. We just needed to lay some new linoleum.

Sounds easy enough.

We actually had originally planned on going to Home Depot and having them install some cheap sheet linoleum that we found online.  No DIY, all DIHome Depot.

So we went into Home Depot's flooring department where we met a very charming woman who took one look at us and assumed we were handier than we are.

She started to explain that HD would charge us an arm and a leg and half of the other leg to install linoleum in our less than 100 sq. ft. laundry room.  She started rattling off charges for removal and haul away of the old flooring, then sub flooring and installation of the new floor.  

Basically, she was being very nice and trying to save us money.

She explained to us that she herself had installed a linoleum floor and it was easy peasy.  I actually think she used the words "easy peasy," or maybe I used those words after she said "its so easy, and idiot could do it" or something like that.

She walked us over to the laminate flooring aisle where she showed us the wonders of stick together faux-wood flooring.   Then after she regaled us with her DIY skills and how easy this floor is to lay, she added up our total cost if we DIY'ed the floor.  We were looking at less than $150 for the whole thing.  AND, all it takes to install the floor is a straight edge and a knife.  We didn't even need special tools.

Sold.

Especially when you compare it to the $600-800 it was going to cost for HD to install it for us, we were pretty excited about DIYing the floor.

So we bought 4 cases, a pack of pocket knives and headed on our merry way.

We got to the house and cracked open the boxes and I read the directions very carefully.

Basically, the planks stick together with glue that is already part of each plank.  They don't stick to the floor at all, so you can remove it anytime you want.  You simply peel off the protective sheet, lay it down and then stick them together. To cut a plank, simply score it with a knife and bend it in half to break it cleanly.
The blue is the glue strips
Again, I'm thinking this is easy peasy.

So I took some planks out and went to work. The faux wood was actually kind of good looking too!


When we got to the end of our first row, we found the cutting the boards down to size was not as easy peasy as the directions (or the HD lady) had made it sound.  Some of them didn't break cleanly and rough and jagged edges were not what we wanted.

After struggling with how to cut them, we finally got our grove and get a good chunk of the floor done.
Then we hit a snag.

The room was not exactly square, and we started to notice that cutting angles was going to be a NIGHTMARE, because you had to make multiple cuts on angles that were not at 90 degree angles, and these planks do not like anything by 90 degree angles.

We both were getting frustrated, but we kept with it, because I was sure we could do it.

Then we got to this corner.

And we panicked.

How were were going to cut that indent around the door jam? Not to mention the wonky angle of the corner....

And that is when we quit.

We literally, got up and left.

We called Jon, our contractor we used on the kitchen, and told him where the house was and left him a key under the mat and we washed our hands of DIY flooring.

He went it, finished the job and it still cost us less than having HD install the sheet linoleum. Plus it looks way better. 

I'm not a fan of laminate faux wood, but in a tiny laundry room, it is actually pretty pleasing and it doesn't look cheap.


So, we are officially quitters. 

Apparently, when the going gets tough, we call Jon.

Comments