Quick Update On Our Latest Floor Renovation

Replacing Laminate In Our Rental

What a crazy week! As it always seems to happen, if I take a long weekend off from work, I really pay for it the next week and this last week was no exception. Oh and I lied about the quick update, go get a coffee or tea, I couldn’t stop typing…

In my previous post, I talked about upgrading some water damaged floor in one of our shared accommodation properties with a newer product our flooring guy recommended called Sobella.  Well it was installed last week and it looks great.

I spent all morning removing the baseboards, moving the fridge, stove and other furniture out of the way, pulling the toilet and tearing out the old vanity and then finally removing the flooring. Now I normally recommend bringing someone else in to do a bunch of this for you, but sometimes you just have to get your hands dirty.

If this is the sort of thing you like to do, here’s my rogues gallery of essential tools.

Various pry and crow bars to remove baseboards and lift flooring, a utility knife to cut the silicone on the tops of the baseboards (this keeps the paint from pulling away from the wall) and the handy hammer to force the pry bars and crowbars when needed.

As always seems to occur, once you start a job like this you always end up with additional problems or headaches along the way. This was no exception. After spending hundreds and hundreds of thousands of dollars on reno and flip projects, here’s one rule I always employ when looking at my renovation budget.

Always count on exceeding your initial budget by 10%, and then add another 10% on top of that. Then hopefully, you end up under your budget. You never want to run out of money on a renovation, so that cushion can help protect you from unforeseen hiccups or hidden issues. And sometimes even this may leave you short!

One rental property we bought we needed to move some walls around in the semi finished basement to put a bathroom in and to finish it off properly. Part of this project involved removing the 1970’s style paneling form the outside walls. Once we removed the paneling, we discovered the homeowner had cheated and used 2 x 2’s as studs and insulated the concrete outer walls with cardboard rather than actual insulation.
Once we saw this, we were suddenly faced with rebuilding and insulating the entire basement which was the proper, yet expensive, thing to do. Needless to say, this blew the budget out of the water, but we got it done and made the property, better, warmer and a little more valuable.

We had inherited the installed laminate flooring with this property and although it looked fine in the most visible areas, in the kitchen, behind the appliances and in the bathroom I ran into some of those little issues that pop up.

First with laminate flooring, you need to let the floor float as it expands and contracts with the seasons. To allow this floating, you need to leave space against each wall allowing it to expand without buckling. If you leave too much space though, the floor can move and start to separate, which occurred in the kitchen.

Normally, you can use some special tools to tighten up the flooring and fix it, if you catch it early enough. But if the gaps against the walls are too loose, it will just happen over and over. Or if you tenants don’t tell you about it and food and crumbs collect in the gaps, you can’t tighten it either.

Since we were just ripping it out, this wasn’t going to be a problem, but then more problems. In the bathroom, you really want your flooring to be up tight against the toilets closet flange. The closet flange is basically where the toilet sits on the pipe and if the flooring is tight, you can easily seal it with silicone. Then if any leakage occurs, it shows up around the toilet, rather than getting caught between the flooring hidden from sight.

Guess what, yep, the flooring wasn’t tight and water had gotten underneath the laminate and on the sub floor. Fortunately it wasn’t too bad, it must have been a fairly recent leak and there was no mould, but I still had some water to deal with. So I removed the flooring, mopped up the excess water and now had to run to my storage garage to grab my huge industrial fan to start drying it out.

With water, it’s important to get the air flowing to help dry it out quickly and reduce complications like mould and ages ago we had acquired a very large industrial type fan unit that looks like a mini furnace, except it has a huge blower in it. More lost time.

Finally, after several hours, I had all the flooring pulled and now I could see what we had to work with. This was the part the fellow who quoted us was worried about. We had a hodge podge of regular particle board sub flooring, old laminate and even parquet (yep it’s that old), all buried under the laminate.

I did have to use some filler in the bathroom where it looked like they used scrap pieces to fill in sections under the bathroom cabinet, but overall it wasn’t too bad. Since it was a new type of flooring to me though, I ended up calling the person who did the initial quotation and explained what it looked like.

He was only about 20 minutes away, so he offered to come over and take a look and once there, other than the bathroom section, thought the rest of the area the installers should be good with. So onward and upwards.

Fast forward to the next day and the installers met my wife at the property so she could explain everything to them and let them in (I had meetings that morning). Once they started, she ran off and took care of some other projects we had going on.

By the time I finally arrived just before 1, they were already 90% complete. And it looked great!

We were originally told they would be able to install it as one continuous sheet, but once the installers looked at the layout they decided they would need to have one seem due to the layout.

In the after shot at the beginning of this, you can see the line of tape marking where they had to place it. With the little island that sticks out in the kitchen, it was a challenge to run the heavy section down without tearing it there.

Now that it’s installed you don’t even see the seam unless you know it’s there and the floor looks and feels great.

They ended up finishing by two (a five hour install) and this gave us another hour to make the next day’s list of projects to move this reno forward before we went to the dump with our old laminate.

As I mentioned before, that 10% add on to your budget (plus another 10%), gives you a ton of flexibility. Once we went through we decided to replace all the baseboard in the bathroom, to upgrade the fan fixture in the kitchen eating area and to do some quick painting in worn areas.

The fan and baseboards increased the cost, but we just happened to have over half of a five gallon bucket of Tequila (8672W) paint left over from another property. Since the property was originally painted this colour, it just meant some light sanding and minor touchup for prep work and good to go, but that was the next days’ project.

Onto the fun stuff. The flooring has been in for almost a week now and the tenants all seem to like it. This is in a shared accommodation property, so the guys are definitely hard on flooring and after the first week it’s holding up.

The flooring looks so much like wood that we also ran into a couple fun comments from the guys. There is a definite texture on it that imitates wood grain and one of the basement tenants who looked at it said they should have sanded the floor down a bit more (he thought it was real wood).

Another tenant who lives on the main floor noticed that the installers had forgotten to cut the floor vent out. He wanted to know if I would be back that night with a saw and drill to cut it open as he had an early morning the next day. He also thought it was real wood. I simply cut it out with a utility knife and dropped in the new vent we had for it. No drilling, so sawing, just a couple minutes work.

This type of article is definitely straying from the normal information I post. My question for you, Has it been helpful? Would you like more walk throughs of renovations projects, some of our day to day operations and other interesting parts of our lives as landlords, or should I just stick to the weekly tips and videos like I have been?

If you could take a minute or two and either leave me a comment below, or email me directly with some feedback, it would be extremely helpful and help shape what future articles look like. This project and the long weekend before have thrown my videos and posts schedule for a loop, but hopefully with the kids back in school and life on track I’ll have my next series of videos out and available over the next week.