Renovating any room in the house can have its challenges. The size of the challenge is directly related to what you want the final outcome to be. It may look great in your mind but how will the project hold up to your vision?
The first challenge is getting started on the time table of your choosing. Having your plan in place and working the plan the way you want it to work. Are the materials you need for the project at the ready? Did you order far enough in advance to have them on site when you need them? Then perhaps the biggest challenge to this point is; have you figured out how to pay for it?
Now that all this is in place or falling into plan you need to get started. Clear the room and start ripping everything out, or at least rip out the stuff your replacing. The challenge here is to be careful during the demolition and don’t demolish more than you plan to replace. If you're tearing up the floor to put down a new floor covering then don’t damage the walls or cabinets while you’re going nuts on the floor.
Don’t remove too much. Mark out just where you plan to start and stop the renovation or upgrade. Again if you replacing a floor then know just where it will be and don’t create problems in the next room if you don’t plan to replace the floor there. The same holds true for things like tiles around the bath tub. Don’t go farther then you need to. In the door ways it is common to start and stop different floors coverings where the door stops so it will cover up the difference between the two rooms.
The carpet in one room should be apart of that room and the tile in the other room should be a part of that room and so on. Another challenge will be matching up different floor coverings when they’re isn’t a door in place to differentiate between the two rooms. Different textures can be hard to blend in and usually some kind of creative design will do the trick. You may also need some sort of threshold to span the two materials to help blend it all in.
Flooring upgrades are the most popular home improvement project. They are easy to plan and figure out. Just measure and go off to get pricing. Another challenge to flooring changes is the sub-floor. Is yours in good shape? Does it squeak? Is it the right elevation for the new flooring material? Is it smooth and flat enough to take the new floor? If you are planning to lay down linoleum then you will want a truly smooth and flat floor.
Not so important for carpet or hard wood but a tile floor will need a strong sturdy floor and all new floors will be happier if they don’t squeak any more. With the old floor covering out of the way the challenge is to prepare the exposed floor for the new material. Get your screw gun out and screw down the plywood to remove that unnerving squeak. Be prepared for lots of screws as this can be a big job.
Even if you have done a floor or two in the past you can still be surprised when the old flooring materials comes off and the bare floor is exposed. This is the one opportunity you have to fix it up and prepare it properly for the new floor. I have worked on sub-floors where we had to screw down the old floor every ten inches to remove the squeaks. This is not to say that screws are the only fix here. A bigger challenge and one I see often is dealing with the floor joists under the plywood.
Sometimes it’s necessary to screw and glue additional 2X6 boards to the floor joists from underneath to add a more stability or repair a cracked or damaged floor joist. This is much more common in older houses before the idea of screwing down floors became popular. I guess that it only took about sixty years before we all decided that a noisy floor wasn’t so cool any more.
I can only hope the best for you when it comes to your flooring upgrades. But be prepared for big challenges when it comes to this seemingly simple home improvement. Rarely do you ever find a flooring material change that doesn’t come with a squeak or two.
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