So, a while back I began installing new laminate flooring on one floor of the house. It was planned (and purchased for) to cover the living room (where we really do “live”–spend most of our time), dining room, kitchen (with precautions against water damage), and two bedrooms. When I got to the hallway to the two bedrooms on this floor and pulled the carpet and padding, I discovered oak flooring underneath. Sadly, it would take too much work to reclaim it because the moron who installed the carpet glued down the padding! (In addition to stapling it to the oak flooring.)
#gagamaggot
But. . . when I got to the bedrooms, I discovered that the padding was apparently NOT glued down there. *shrugs* I dunno. Maybe the moron thought traffic in the hallway would cause the padding to move. Oh, the carpet pad is still stapled, which means a LOT of fiddly bits to carefully remove, but the flooring itself looks to be in really nice condition. So, removing the carpet and padding a bit at a time (makes removing it from the house easier, anyway) and getting the staples dealt with looks like it will give us back some nice hardwoood flooring we didn’t even know was there.
Oh, transition from the “bronzed acacia” look laminate to the oak flooring will be. . . interesting, but we decided we can live with that pretty easily. I’m using actual oak baseboard trim to make transition from the hallway to the bedrooms, and I decided to stain it “red oak”–different from both the laminate and the oak in the bedrooms. Why? Because the laminate is 3/8” “taller” than the oak floor. The trim I’m using to make transition with tapers down from 3/8”. The different oak stain will provide an almost subliminal cue to the transition in height, hopefully making the (very small) height differential marginally safer to navigate, kind of like those yellow/black warning strips for stairs and shallow ramps. *shrugs* We’ll see.
But then there’s the fact that we’ll be stuck with several hundred square feet of extra laminate. Oh, well. Maybe I will eventually end up doing a garage conversion. Really nice laminate on a workshop/crafts room. *heh*