Hey guys! I’m beyond excited to finally be at this point in our kitchen and dining room renovation! One of our big steps was to install laminate flooring. I’m happy to say that after two days of hard work I got it done 100% on my own!

In case you’re new, THIS is what our kitchen used to look like! We installed new pendant lights, adjusted the layout and painted the cabinets, installed butcher block, and painted the windows black. The next thing to go was that terrible linoleum.

Over in the dining room we had raised up the sunken den, which meant we didn’t even have linoleum, only subfloor. Now here is how the dining room stands today! I’ve still got to caulk the board and batten, raise up the banquette, fix the chip in the table, hang the art, and seam and hem the curtains… but even still, this room has come a LONG ways. You also might notice that we FINALLY have a table! I found it at the Restoration Hardware outlet for an AWESOME deal… it retails for $2,995 and I got it for $600! It does have a chip on the bottom of the left leg but I’ll just wood fill and paint it. I’m so happy to have such a beautiful piece for such a great price!

I can no longer even count the number of times that we’ve installed laminate floors… we’ve done our own, we’ve taught friends, we’ve become old pros.  We love the price of laminate, we love that we can DIY the installation, we love the durability, and we even love the look. We’ve learned that before even starting to cut down all door jambs and remove all trim. We used our Rigid Jobmax to to cut each jam. I recently bought this knee dolly after seeing Chip Gaines roll around on one and they’re pretty cool!**This post contains affiliate links**

Getting your first row straight is one of the most important parts of this process. If you don’t you will be battling the entire time, I laid the entire first row before beginning the second. The best part about this is that you can use the end of the last piece you cut to start the next row.

In order to have the smoothest workflow. I had my table saw, jig saw, coping saw, and miter saw all set up with two plugs. Now that we own a jig saw that I love, I barely used the coping saw, but before owning the jig saw the coping saw could do the job.
After four hours of hard work on day one, this is where I finished. In order to tap each piece into place I’d use a tapping block, and for the pieces up against the cabinetry and walls I’d use a pull bar. These were both VITAL to my success.

In the daylight here’s a better picture of the true color of the flooring. I chose Select Surfaces laminate in “Honey Maple”. I loved that I could go and look at it in person at my local Sam’s Club, and I loved that they had enough in stock to haul it home immediately! I love the hand scraped pattern on the floors, which makes them look much more like real wood. Another thing I REALLY love about this laminate is that it comes with the foam backer already attached! This is a huge time and money saver! It’s also SO much easier than trying to roll out underlayment and keep from damaging it while you work. Select Surfaces also sells a matching trim kit at Sam’s Club, which included the reducers that we used to bridge between our new floors and old parquet. We are loving these new floors so much that we’re actually thinking about carrying them throughout the entire house! They’re just light enough that they don’t show every single speck of dust and dirt. They also look awesome with some of the original wood tones throughout our home.

Once I was done installing all of the flooring, I hung simple white trim and black shoe molding around the cabinets (which I still need to caulk(. This completely covers the 10mm expansion gap in the flooring. Doesn’t this color just look amazing paired with the deep dark cabinets?

Now I’m down to the final week of the One Room Challenge, and although it’s all coming together I still feel like there’s SO much that I need to accomplish. By the time I reveal these two rooms I really want them to be 100% complete. Make sure you stop back next week to see the fully styled, staged, and completed reveal! I’ll be sharing a full source list in the reveal, but here’s shopable images for most of the items in these two rooms:

I’m so grateful to Select Surfaces for providing the flooring for this space. All opinions are 100% mine and I can’t wait to install the same product throughout the rest of our home! Thanks to sponsors like them I’m able to keep BrightGreenDoor going!

**Update** to see the Kitchen and Dining Room reveal head to this post!