As you may have seen in the photoblog, we put new flooring in the basement this weekend.

About a month and a half ago, Kirsten and I were in Windsor Plywood on the south side. We knew that we were going to be putting a new floor in the basement, so we were just starting to look around and see what was available. We stopped at Windsor, after looking at a few other places, and noticed that they had some really nice laminate flooring. Even better, it was $1.50 per sq. ft., marked down from $3.50 per sq. ft. Kirsten jumped on it and we had 600 sq. ft. delivered to the house. The flooring was random length, only 4 1/2" wide, and had a v-notch. All of this actually makes it look very much like real wood flooring with the added benefit of being able to put it down in our basement.

And so it sat in our basement for the next month, taunting and tempting Kirsten to put it down, until Dad came up to help us put it down.

I picked Dad up from the airport on Friday, and we all spent Saturday and Sunday putting the flooring down. It went a heck of a lot quicker than I imagined it would, once we decided to abandon the idea of using a pattern and just placing boards by eye as we went along (it turned out that the size of the rooms were such that attempting to follow a pattern would result in a large amount of waste and repeated seams, which are a big no-no).

There were a couple of weird areas to deal with though. First, which you can see in the photo, was around the woodstove's brick base. On the one side, we had to cut a small 1" strip to fit in beside. On the other, we had to follow a jagged zig-zag to the wall, which required notching out each piece that sat against it. The other weird area was going into the spare downstairs bedroom, whose door is set at an angle -- an angle that isn't 45°ree;, which would have made sense. Finally, there was a weird bit around the stairs where we had to notch out a plan to account for the bottom riser. In the end, we put down around 600 sq. ft. of flooring in two 6 hours shifts, plus another hour or so on the Monday to take care of the weird bits.

And man, does it look beautiful.