Wood, laminate or carpet? We chose laminate.

When we bought our first home, it had wood flooring throughout most of the downstairs. We covered most of it up with carpet almost immediately.

When we moved to our current home, it was all carpet. We just as immediately ripped out half of that and replaced it with laminate wood flooring. If we had more spare money, we might have ripped all the carpet out.

Styles and fashion sure do change, don't they? Our decision to put down laminate had nothing to do with current fashion, though. We had simply had enough of carpet. The matting down, the fading, the vacuuming. Enough. Laminate is almost indestructible and is easier to clean.

Do you know what really impressed me about laminate flooring? While the installers were putting it in, I took a scrap piece and whacked it with a hammer. No dent, no scratch, no indication that I'd just smashed it with a blunt metal object. Wow!

Do it yourself?

I quickly abandoned that idea. I know that the skill level needed for this is not tremendously advanced, but I also knew that messing any of it up would leave us very unhappy for a long, long time. We decided to go with a professional installer.

The first swing was to call the various places you see advertised everywhere. They "beat any price" and will come right out for a "free, no cost estimate". Before calling any of them, we did run by Lowes to get a rough idea of what materials might cost and then I Googled about on-line to find out how much time might be required.

The "We'll beat any price folks" must have actually meant that they'd be higher than any price I could imagine. My rough estimating told me that it should cost $3,000.00 or less. Those guys started out at almost double that! As they say, it pays to advertise, but I didn't want to pay that much for their advertising!

We decided to talk to a local guy we had used for small carpentry projects in the past. We knew him to be neat, reliable and especially clever at solving any problems that might come up in the course of the project. We'd buy the flooring and he and his crew would install it. His time estimate plus what we expected to pay for materials was in line with my figures, too.

Too much selection

We did have a heck of a time finding what we wanted at a price we could afford. Laminate flooring comes in an incredible variety of finishes and colors and the prices vary widely. Worse, I tended to gravitate toward darker colors than my wife liked.

Guess who won?

Correct. We bought a lighter color than I wanted. We hauled it home and I unpacked it in the garage in hopes of letting some of the formaldehyde evaporate there rather than in the house. We scheduled the guys to come in a week and the day before I moved all the furniture out of that part of the house and found a temporary place for it elsewhere. When the crew arrived, I had already laid down a double layer of red rosin paper from the garage door to where they would be working. I taped down both layers separately - it's always good to over-protect.

By the way, I have a roll of rosin paper in the garage always. You never know when you'll need to temporarily protect a floor or carpet. Rosin paper is cheap and tough.

Creaks

The crew made quick work of disposing of the carpet. I was happy to know that one of them wanted it to use in his own basement remodeling project - it seemed so wasteful to toss out brand new carpet.

Why was it brand new? Our house was actually one someone else had designed and spec'ed, but they had run into the housing crash and were unable to sell their current home at a price they could accept. That's how we ended up with a brand new home that had features we didn't want - like the carpet.

After leveling off one spot on the subfloor that needed some attention, the crew began laying the floor. People who have done this before can make it look so easy - the work just zipped along. They soon finished up the main room and started down the hallway. That of course required more cutting and fitting, so the work was slower.

When they reached the end, I walked down to survey the final result and was unhappy to find something loose at one end of the hall. When I stepped in a particular spot, I could hear a definite creak and even feel something moving underfoot. Not good. Something like that is not going to go away; if anything it will only get worse.

We'd have to tear it up

The crew our carpenter had brought was not happy about this. One of them tried to convince me that it wasn't a big deal. I disagreed. He said it was impossible to fix. I disagreed again. He said they'd have to redo the whole hall. I didn't see where that was my problem.

Our carpenter took our side. He pointed out that while he could certainly agree with the installer that cosmetically the floor was fine and that the creak would not affect its longevity, having to hear that creak every time we entered the room was not acceptable.

There was more argument, but I hadn't paid anybody yet and I wasn't about to. The floor crew gave in and started taking up the floor to work backward toward the creak. It really didn't take them all that long to fix it and there was plenty enough extra material if any couldn't be reused.

When they finished, I walked the whole floor slowly, pausing to bounce up and down regularly. That cost me some bemused looks from the installers, but I wanted to be sure everything was good.

It was, and has remained so six years later.

Why laminate? Advantages and disadvantages

As I mentioned above, durability was important to us. If a blow from a hammer didn't hurt it, it isn't going to wear away from foot traffic easily. We're usually barefoot or in slippers while in the house, so that really shouldn't matter to us, but things do get dropped and every now and then we might walk through with gritty shoes or sneakers.

On the other hand, that durability also makes laminate a poor choice for recycling. On still another hand, it can be made from recycled materials. Overall, the eco-friendliness of laminate is complicated.

Laminate can look like wood or stone, so you can find just about anything you'd want. There is a wide range of price, selection and quality.

Laminate has no cracks for dirt and dust to hide in. In that sense, it's great for allergy sufferers. However, there is a high chemical content involved in the manufacture and it can give off formaldehyde gases for some time. The issue of healthy flooring is also complicated.

We hoped that laying out the flooring in our garage for a few days would help with the formaldehyde, but it probably didn't help enough. My wife felt discomfort for some time after the initial installation.

Laminate is easy to clean. You can't generally hose it down, but you can wash it with a damp rag or mop and often just a light sweeping is enough. That's because it's quite slippery, as my wife recently found out while trying to step into her pajamas. She slipped and fell, hurting herself quite badly. We've learned to be much more careful in that part of the house.

However, we are happy with our choice. While the carpet is now much duller and more matted and worn (in spite of a professional steam cleaning several times), the laminate floor still looks like new. It is, of course, colder under foot in the winter, and I did mention the slipperiness, but taken as a whole, we think it's better.

I'm not sure about the rest of the house. The carpet is good for at least a few more years, but we'll probably have to do something eventually. The laminate formaldehyde issue bothered us, but there are low formaldehyde types available and I suppose we could let it sit out even longer. Carpet has chemical problems too and anything that doesn't is either wildly expensive or doesn't have great durability.

Oh, well. We'll cross that bridge when we get to it.