Updating my office!

Since the FIOS guy was going to have to, in all likelihood, drill a hole in the wall to install our super high speed innerweb, we were going to have to move everything in my office. Since we were going to have to move everything in my office, we decided to paint my office, too. Once the office was mostly empty, we saw how horrible the carpet was, so we looked into redoing the floor with new carpet, or maybe some laminate floors. We settled on some blue colors to match the world map on the back wall, and some “hemse” laminate “click” flooring from IKEA.
To see how it all went, follow the link!

At first I was a little hesitant to try to install some wood (woodlike?) flooring ourselves. I’ve heard stories ranging from “it was easy” to “oh my god we screwedup so bad and had to pay soemeone else to fix it!”. I got all the good information you can find from google, and found some interesting results, and a couple other blogs that installed flooring and had lots of good tips. We also saw that IKEA sells flooring, and not only is it cheap, but it is made by Pergo, so it isn’t cheaply manufactured. Apparently, the guys at IKEA tell us, that Pergo makes it in their specific colors/styles to match their furniture, so you can only find those colors/styles at IKEA. We also were fortunate to be at IKEA while they were doing install “demonstrations”, so that was helpful too. It was a 10 minute or so demo of installing it, cutting it, etc, and it answered a couple of my questions without even having to ask them. They bang on the floor with some tools to show that you won’t scratch it or ding it without really trying. They also have their flooring all over the store with signs on it that say “50,000 people a year walk on this floor” to advertise the durability, so it couldn’t be all bad. At 99cents a square foot you can’t really go wrong! One strange thing is that this “Hemse” flooring we got does not appear anywhere on the IKEA website. At the Seattle store, they told us that they have a lot more items in stock in the store than the website shows, and more than what is in the catalog. In this day and age, that seems a little odd. I can see IKEA not wanting to ship most of the stuff they make, but you’d think it would all be on the website for reference!

So we bought about 140 square feet worth (the office is roughly 11’x10′ plus a small closet), and we figured that would give us some extra when we screwed up. We also got some cardboard underlay stuff, and some foam padding. The cardboard is optional, but they recommended it since it was on a second floor, it would reduce some sound.

What they didn’t tell us at IKEA, but was on the packages of flooring, was that the flooring needs to sit in the room for 48 hours before you can install it. So once we got it all home, we couldn’t really DO anything with it. The fiberboard didn’t say anything about 48 hours, so i put that all down, leaving space for the edges. wasn’t real hard, just lay it down edge to edge, leave gaps for the walls (they sell these little spacers at IKEA too, how handy!), and cut the pieces on the edges and at the end of the room to fit with a boxcutter. Was really easy.

So monday night it was finally 48 hours, so we went to start installing it. We were really surprised that the fiberboard had curled up and was bubbled up everywhere. We tried laying down one row of the flooring, but with the fiberboard curled up, the floor bubbled up too. So we took all of the cardboard stuff and tossed it in the recycle bin. So we layed down a layer of the underlay foam stuff, and started laying down flooring. On monday night, we got through about a third of the room. On tuesday night we had a slow start. The first row we were going to do was the one that started inside the closet that had to have a notch cut out, and inside the closet it was narrower, so it had to have a long section cut out of it. So that took us a while to get perfect, then we got rolling… Until we got to a whole box of flooring that was misprinted. All 10 pieces (about 30 square feet) had a stripe down one edge, the long way. Hypothetically we could use 3 of the pieces for the last row, where we’d have to cut some off, but we still needed the other 7 pieces to do the rest of the room. So we used up the rest of what we had, and scheduled another trip for IKEA for wednesday after work. because any new stuff we bought would have to sit in the room for 48 hours before we could put it down….Thursday we had kickball, so we didn’t do any work, and friday we went out, so we decided to finish saturday. So we’d recommend that you open up every box of flooring you get and look at all of it before you start (or before you leave IKEA!) so that you don’t have to go back.

All saturday we worked in the office, putting in the rest of the flooring and putting in new outlets, trim, etc. The last row was a big pain, as you need to cut it lengthwise, but we managed! having a table saw would have made it take like 10 seconds instead of 10 minutes, though!

Putting all of the furniture in took a long time too. Since i had everything out, i could re-arrange, clean up, rewire things, and maybe get rid of some of the junk that used to be in there! Now that everything is back in there, it all looks so much better!