On our latest rental project, we decided to go with Pergo XP flooring from Home Depot for the bedrooms, living/dining areas and hallway. It’s a wood laminate floating floor.  We were just tired of replacing carpet every time someone moves out and hoping this will last a little longer.

Floor color…
We chose the Warm Chestnut color in Pergo XP from Home Depot. We are going to go with Allure Ultra for the kitchen since it’s waterproof. We chose Sawcut Dakota and bought it online – it matches almost exactly the Warm Chestnut color in the Pergo XP so that worked out well. Deciding on the colors wasn’t easy (it never is).  The walls are a light greige color and the flooring seems to go well with it.

Floor leveling…
Our dilemma: there was carpeting in the living room and parkay flooring in the dining room. We planned to pull up the carpet, but leave the parkay in because it would’ve been a NIGHTMARE to pull up – that stuff is glued down solidly. So, we had a 5/8 inch difference in height between the two floors once the carpeting was pulled up. We were so indecisive about this – we went back and forth between trying to pull up the parkay, etc. Finally, we just decided to put some 5/8 inch plywood down in the living room. We already had two layers of plywood there, but oh well – what’s another layer?!?

And the current plywood is squeaky in spots which we tried to remedy but to no avail. Nothing seemed to get rid of the squeak. It’s an old building – people will just have to deal with a few squeaks – it adds character, right? 😉 People won’t be able to sneak around, eh?

Well, we researched a ton about how to add a layer of plywood to an existing layer of plywood and there are so many different ways it seemed. Some people glued the layers down then screwed them down and some people just nailed them down. It was dizzying for us because we tend to be on the indecisive side anyway.

My husband bought all the plywood and some leveler mix for the areas that were sloped a little downward and then we found out Home Depot was having a special on flooring install so we decided to go with them! Save us, please! :-p After all that work watching videos to do it ourselves and going back and forth! We had already laid half a room of flooring by ourselves, but the idea of someone else doing it and doing it much faster was too alluring.

Home Depot saves the day…
So, we scheduled with Home Depot three weeks out, but they called and told us they had an opening come up sooner on the weekend – yes! On enters a guy from Transylvania (well, from Chicago, but originally from Transylvania)! I’m not kidding! How cool is that?! I asked Bryon if he showed him his widow’s peak and said he was from Transylvania too. I’m sure that would’ve gone over well.:-p I’m always joking with Bryon that he’s a vampire because he has a severe widow’s peak and he has a machine in the bedroom where he hangs upside down to help his back.  :-p  Anyway, hope I didn’t offend anyone who’s from Transylvania – bad vampire joke!  This guy finished the entire flooring project in one day!!!!!

He says we don’t need to level the areas that are sloped (we were going to use the leveler mix for this) because the flooring is very thick and forgiving. I hope he’s right! It wasn’t sloped by much – maybe 1/2 inch and only in some spots. Then, on the side that had the carpet, he just cut up the plywood and stapled it to the existing subfloor and boom! It’s level! I’m in shock when Bryon tells me this because we have seriously been going back and forth on this for 3 months by that point! We were getting other stuff accomplished in the mean time, of course (hanging doors).

He put transition strips down at the bedrooms because those were a different level, but that was the plan from the beginning. We also thought we were going to have to have transition strips at the hallway but the guy thought it was level enough to go straight across. Woohoo! It looks so much better without transition strips.  It was pretty level and the hallway had a slope to it but you can’t even tell! The hallway was a little crooked so he had to adjust the flooring accordingly. We love it – he did great work and can’t beat getting that all done in just one day – some things are just worth the extra money..

Here’s some pictures:

Here’s the transition between the Allure Ultra (kitchen side) and the Pergo XP (dining room side).  You can hardly tell the difference right?  I think next time we may do Allure Ultra everywhere instead of Pergo XP because it seems to be slightly more durable.