We’re in the middle of the very long process of replacing all of our upstairs carpet with bamboo. As in, it’s been going on for years now, and I’m not sure when it will be complete. But right now we’ve done three out of four bedrooms, so I feel ready to talk about the big question of how it’s all going and whether installing a floating floor is something you might want to tackle on your own.

That’s Ari’s room up there; it was the first room we did this summer (the rest of the Ari’s room updates are still in progress. He was supposed to be going back to college right about now, but thanks to a certain pesky pandemic, he’ll be here until at least the end of October, so we’re hoping to make a nice place for him to do online classes in there soon). Then we did Abe’s room:

And way back a couple of years ago, we did Milo and Gus’s room:

So what’s left is our bedroom (and our massive closet). It’s a huge room, and I’m a little intimidated by it and mostly by the idea of getting all the furniture out of there and figuring out where we’re going to sleep while we don’t have floors. We’ll see!

We used Eco Forest Mocha bamboo from Floor and Decor in all the rooms.

Okay, but the point of this post is not just to show off our pretty new floors. Nor is it a how-to guide, as there are already plenty of those out there by people who’ve installed a lot more floors than we have. It’s more some thoughts on how to decide if installing your own floors is something you want to tackle yourself, along with some things we learned along the way.

Which do you have more of: time or money?

I mean, this is nearly always the first question you want to ask when you’re deciding whether to DIY something or not, right? Installing a floating floor is not usually a particularly time consuming job. The actual process of putting down the floors goes pretty quickly–the only thing that slows you down is tricky cuts going around doorways and such. But you also have to rip up your existing flooring generally speaking (in our case that was carpet, along with all the tacks that go along with carpet). And–we’ll get to this more in a minute–the subfloors won’t necessarily be pristine and level and ready to receive your new floor.

Do you have the right tools (or a desire for an excuse to buy new tools)?

The only tool we bought specifically to do floors was a table saw, but we also used our miter saw and jigsaw. Dave reports that he could have gotten away with a circular saw in place of the miter saw and table saw, but it would have taken a lot longer. The jigsaw is essential for cutting around tricky pieces. If you’re a regular in the world of DIY, you might well already have all or most of these saws. None of them are especially expensive; they’ll probably pay for themselves with this one project, but you still might be reluctant to invest in a whole arsenal of new saws unless you’re planning to use them regularly. Dave was happy to have an excuse to buy a table saw, so this part worked out well for him.

Are you comfortable with power tools?

This kind of goes along with the last point, of course. The skill level required for installing floors isn’t that high, relatively speaking. It’s not fine woodworking or anything. But you do need to be able to handle some tricky cuts, and you might be in for a lot of frustration if this is your first foray into cutting a whole lot of wood (or bamboo, as the case may be). A lot of installing the floors is just snapping things into place, but the parts where you’re going around corners and filling in little pieces by the walls will take up a lot of your time and are the most likely to leave you wishing you’d just hired someone.

Are you willing to deal with whatever you find underneath your current flooring?

Maybe you live in a perfect house and your subfloors are completely level and wouldn’t dream of giving you any trouble. We do not live in such a house. Our house is nearly 40 years old, and maybe the floors were level when they were first put in (or maybe not), but the years have not treated them kindly. Or maybe they haven’t treated the foundation kindly, and there’s been some settling. At any rate, here is the story of how we handled this issue when we did Milo and Gus’s floor:

We didn’t.

The floor looked level enough, so it didn’t occur to us to investigate further.

And things seemed to go okay…except that Milo and Gus’ floor is quite…bouncy in certain areas. So far this is not a huge deal, and it may never be a huge deal, but it also may cause some of the board to crack under the stress over time.

This time around we actually pulled out a level after the carpet came up in Ari’s and later in Abe’s room. And we discovered that neither subfloor was level.

Our first reaction was denial. Again, it looked level enough; surely it would be fine! With Ari’s room, we got as far as putting the underlayment down and starting to lay the floor before we discovered considerable, worrying bounciness and decided we should probably do it right this time.

Which meant buying this self leveling stuff and pouring it on the floor. It really wasn’t so bad! But it terrified and overwhelmed us nevertheless.

So my tips for using self-leveler: don’t panic! It’s really not so bad! Actually figuring out which parts of the floor were lower and higher and where to pour the leveler was the complicated part. Which leads me to tip #2 (keeping in mind that we have done this exactly twice and are far from experts, but this is what we found): it’s easier to just pour it all over the place and then smooth it out than to try to figure out a small area that really needs it. If we had it to do over again, we’d probably have just done the entire room and had better results. As it was, we tried to determine small parts of the floor that had dips, and that was really more trouble than it was worth, in retrospect. Although doing the whole floor probably means you need to buy those spike things to fit over your shoes.

 

The main problem with needing to do the self-leveler is that it added a lot of time to the process. Partially actually putting it down and waiting for it to dry and all that, and partially because we spent so much time fretting and trying to decide if we really needed it and which kind to buy and watching videos about how to do it and all that.

But it went fine, and our new floors are not bouncy! Or at least they’re only a tiny bit bouncy. There’s one corner of Ari’s room that probably should have gotten leveler and didn’t. But that’s where his bed is, so no one walks there!

Anyway, now let’s look at Abe’s floors some more:

Sometimes that stripey rug is there, and sometimes it’s not, because I still need to get something to keep it from slipping all over the place. I’ve had it forever, but it’s been sitting in the closet because when there was still carpet in there you couldn’t close the door with the rug on top of it.

These lovely floors make me extra sad about the terrible carpet in my own bedroom. We’re coming for you next, terrible carpet! Only we need to pay for a bunch of new windows first. Which is not as fun as new floors.

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