New flooring

I mentioned before that one of the big projects that we wanted to get done at our new-to-us park model is to replace the carpet in the living room and bedroom with a solid surface flooring. Last Thursday was the day...

We elected to move the furniture out of the rooms ourselves -- you can see from this view of the living room how discolored the carpet was, and how it has ridges from needing stretching. Carl found a carpet stretcher among the tools that the previous owner had in his shop -- so we think that the previous owner may have stretched it, or attempted to stretch it, in the past. Since our community has asphalt roads, it is inevitable that we will track in black dust on our shoes... and that had been done a lot to this carpet -- the areas where furniture had been or an area carpet had been laid over the carpet were the only clean areas. We didn't think that it was going to be worth trying to clean and/or stretch the old carpet.

In preparation, we moved much of the living room furniture in the dining/office area...

...we put some more of it onto the front porch.

We got the bedside tables out of the bedroom, and we put the mattress into the bathroom, but... we couldn't move the base -- too heavy and too awkward. We decided to leave it and ask for help from the installers. When they came, they indicated that they could just move it around within the room as they worked -- great! cuz there really was no other place to put it!

The installer brought in a few pieces of the new flooring so we could approve that it was what we wanted (it was!).

 

I had to leave to go to a doctor appointment (normal testing), so Carl was left to "supervise" and deal with all the noise and disruption...

They took up the carpet in the living room...

... product awaiting installation on the porch.

They did a lot of sanding down of the subfloor to remove any raised portions that would cause the new flooring to not lay flat.

Laying the flooring -- we got laminate flooring as it was recommended as being the best for raised Arizona room floors (not on concrete). Christian, the installer, used something that looked like a large nipper to cut the pieces at the ends of the room.

Work in progress

After the installation, we wanted to clean all the floors before we put things back... 

... so I was cleaning under the bed (it has a foundation that raises up like in an RV) when Carl took this picture.

Some of the living room put back together (Miss Kitty is on her heating pad on the sofa). The furniture came with the park model when we purchased it.

We still have more things to get set up in the living room -- the home theater system that we brought back from Kim's and other electronics need to be re-hooked up. Right now, the TV is working with a Fire stick, so that's sufficient for the moment. 

We are happy with the new flooring -- though, as Carl says, we won't even notice it after a week or so!