DIY Floor Renovation | Townhouse Renovation

Our beautiful new townhome, which I LOVE, came with builder-grade carpet and vinyl flooring – which I HATED!

Both my husband and I knew we wanted sleeker, more modern floors, but we also knew we didn’t want to pay sleek or modern prices for them. The builder pricing for Luxury Vinyl Plank flooring throughout the whole house was around $13K. As much as we adore the house and the life we’re building inside of it, this isn’t our forever home, and we just couldn’t justify spending too much on upgrades.

For me, that meant investing time and effort instead of money. I probably spent a million hours watching a million YouTube videos on DIY floor renovations, but taking the time to familiarize myself with the process led to us saving almost $7,000.

Total cost: $3,700
Level of difficulty: 8/10
Total time spent: 2 1/5 months (While Working full-time and moving in a pandemic)

Materials Used
– Laminate Flooring – HERITAGE HEARTH OAK WATER-RESISTANT LAMINATE
– Installation Kit
– Underlayment
– Hammer
– Utility Knife
– Crow Bar
– Gloves
– Kneepads
– Tool for removing staples – CUTTING PLIERS
– Oscillating tool

We decided to leave the carpet and the two spare bedrooms, but remove it everywhere else. Our home can with wood stairs with a dark stain, so we wanted something as close to that as possible.

We initially searched for luxury vinyl plank options, because they seemed to be the most popular choices. While we found plenty of options within our price range, we ended up not finding the color or texture we felt matched our oak wood stairs well. We settled on a laminate floor that ended up being a really good price and a great match.

How to do DIY floor renovations

1. Demolition

With gloved hands, start by ripping up the carpet. Use the utility knife to cut through the fabric in strips, making sure not to cut them too big so they’ll be easier to manage and dispose of. The carpet area was quick and easy, and we finished in a couple of hours. Remove the tack strips with a crow bar and sweep up.

If you only have carpet, you’re lucky! Lol! Skip to step 2.

Additional notes on demolition: The really difficult and time-consuming part of demo was removing the laminate flooring that was glued to this plywood and stapled into the subfloor, in addition to the quarter round molding on top of it.

From looking at the area, we’re talking hundreds of staples that needed to be removed. That meant spending hours (and days) on our hands and knees ripping up this floor. Oh, and the staples are tough, too. What worked well for us are these cutting pliers.

I wish I had a tip for removing the actual plywood, but unfortunately, I don’t. It took a lot of strength and effort to rip up. We alternated between a crowbar and the back of a hammer. It’s a grueling part of the process but it has to be done! You want the floor to be leveled.

2. Underlayment

On a leveled, freshly stripped floor, unroll the underlayment according to package directions and cut the pieces to size. Lay them evenly with little to no gaps. The underlayment process was pretty quick and painless!

3. Laying the floor

We only used wall spacers on one side of the wall. Since there were two different types of flooring, there ended up being an existent gap between the floor and the trim. You want to use spacers because these floors can expand and contract, so you typically want to leave space on both sides so the floor doesn’t buckle. We alternated rows starting with one full board and one half-board to get the look we wanted. We used a borrowed table saw to cut our boards down, but you can also buy a floor cutting tool if you don’t already own a saw.

This part was pretty straight forward as well.

Overall, I would say the difficulty level on this project was around a 8 out of 10. Pulling up the under the vinyl glued to plywood was a nightmare if I’m being honest. Also, coordinating around our work schedule proved to be really difficult.

Even though it took a considerable amount of time and effort, we were able to make the upgrades we wanted without spending a fortune. And the end result turned out better than we could’ve imagined!

For more details, check out this video of our actual process.