I proclaimed the day after my biopsy a Soul Day. When you work 40 hours a week & then some more on the weekend and have your boob poked and prodded (in a bad way), it’s a self-empowering moment when you decide to take a day off mid-week. I feel like I am cheating the system when I shirk responsibilities as the world carries on around me on a mere Thursday (muah ha ha).
In my world, a Soul Day consists of sleeping in without setting an alarm (one of life’s most blissful happenings), shuffling around with coffee and my dog, and then jumping into a project (seeing as how I haven’t found a cure for C.S.M.A.D. yet). In the extra time that life afforded me this past week, I looked at my kitchen floor just long enough to become thoroughly annoyed by it.
I’m no stranger to floor coverings; this is my 3rd round with this house alone. The first experience was with hardwood floors, followed by paper bag floors on three different surfaces. (I must report now that paper bags over laminate flooring in a bathroom turned out to be a ticking time bomb. Moisture + puppy = new floor covering needed, like now.) With each floor project, I have been impressed with the outcome and how its affect updates the look of the entire room. However, I am a learn-from-your-mistakes kinda gal and this go round was no different.
If you already know the difference between ‘staggered’ or ‘aligned’ seam lines, you are smarter than the July ’19 version of me and probably cringe when you view the adjacent picture. I, however, wasn’t able to see the ugly pattern I had created of aligned seams until I was 3 rows from being done.
The first step of this project was ripping up peel n’ stick squares that appeared to have been attached 50 years ago with the same material used to assemble rat traps. Luckily, peeling up more recently laid peel n’ stick planks that you are unhappy with wasn’t as difficult, but persuaded me to add a tile adhesive to the backs of each plank before re-sticking them down ($7.00 @ Lowe’s).
Although I probably should have done a little more research about the benefits of using levels and other measuring devises for house projects, I still give this project a green light for ease and dramatic effect to a room with an inexpensive price tag. Each plank cost $0.99; my normal sized kitchen and hallway used about 100 planks. Click-in-place laminate flooring would have cost $1.60 more per plank, and I’m sure are more much durable. If I had the extra cash to spend, it would have been a no brainer to level up on quality.
I had to replace some pieces of subfloor after the first ripping phase, but that step is easier than it sounds. I simply walked up to an employee at the hardware store and asked for a sheet of 1/4 inch thick subfloor, cut small enough to put in my car. Once home, I roughly measured the size I needed and cut the sub floor with a small electric hand-held saw comparable to an electric turkey cutter. My lines were not perfect but since I was covering it up, as they say in Jamaica, “No worries mon.” I nailed each piece down with 4 flooring nails and that was that.
I like to use the fact that my house was built in ’55 as an excuse for it not having straight lines (like, anywhere). This also saves me having to hold myself responsible for not utilizing measuring devices during projects. I figure all houses settle at some point and, let’s face it, we are all existing on a constantly moving sphere so there’s bound to be some shifting. Anyhow, I said all of that to say that ‘staggering the seams’ made unevenness in my floor (and house) more apparent. I was able to see the white adhesive between the cracks of some of the planks. Over time, though, dirt will surely cover the white and those cracks won’t even be noticable.
Hands down, the least desirable part of this project was the monotony of going back and forth to lay the planks. I took a break to write this post because I began to feel like Jesse in the scene from the new Breaking Bad movie where he is desperately searching a house for money by zig zagging back and forth, up and down, each and every room. (Did I mention that another perk of a Soul Day is catching a Netflix movie you’ve been eyeing?) Regardless of the sporadic moments of boredom, I am now happy instead of annoyed when I walk through my kitchen and ready to face the week with a revived soul.