While most of you were enjoying the day off school and work on Easter weekend, our family was ripping out the carpet in our living room and sun room and installing farmhouse laminate floors.

We found the perfect farmhouse laminate flooring and were excited to replace the dingy, dirty carpet. I know what you're thinking...farmhouse laminate??? Is it even possible to get a hand-scraped, authentic wood look with laminate? I promise you that it is, and I'll be sharing a full reveal post in a couple days!

Select Surfaces laminate planks are available at Sam's Club and are much more affordable than you might think! Plus, they really do rival real hardwoods! We love how they look!

But I'm getting ahead of myself. Let me get back to showing you how we prepped the space for the new flooring. If you have teenagers, definitely utilize them to help remove carpeting! Our kids 'enjoyed' the demo and were a huge help! (what part of that sentence sounds a little off, haha??) I'm sure they would much rather have been watching TV and playing video games, but they were anxious to get the furniture back into the room! Doing this project together was great family time with a wonderful reward at the end! 😃

These rooms have received plenty of work already in the short time we've lived in this home! They share a double-sided fireplace with large openings on either side. We painted the dark paneling and bookcases in the living room to create a lighter space. I updated the red brick fireplace in the living room with a dry brush chalk paint treatment to update it (we left the back side of the fireplace brick as you can see above). The sun room at the back of our home was cleared of junk and received gorgeous new reclaimed wood walls...whew, I get tired just remembering all of it!

That carpet though...it really had to go! We were very hesitant to let our new puppy Millie into the room because she immediately went to 4 or 5 spots on the carpet...even after we deep-cleaned them! 

The product we chose for these spaces is Select Surfaces laminate floors in Driftwood , which in my opinion is the perfect farmhouse shade! But if you like darker or lighter flooring, they have many shades to choose from!

So back to Good Friday...and ripping out the carpet and pad. It was a full day's work to get the floor prepped for the laminate floors. Our space is roughly 700 square feet...that's a lot of carpet! Mr DIY cut the carpet and pad into smaller sections, which made it much easier to roll and remove...look at those awesome kids hard at work!

Once the carpet and underpad were removed, there was a tack strip with staples along the perimeter of both rooms to take out.

There was also touch-up painting to do around the baseboards, and new quarter round to paint...that was my job!

We live in SE Texas, and our homes are built on concrete slabs. So instead of subfloors under the carpet, we had concrete. There were a couple areas that were pitted, so Mr DIY had to smooth them out with floor leveler. It also meant that a vapor barrier was a necessity.

Once the floors were vacuumed and the vapor barrier was taped in place, we thought we were ready to start laying the floors, but there were a couple more challenges to consider.

Those built-in bookcases with the feet, as well as the molding around the fireplace and doorways, were our biggest challenge in this space! The walls are not totally square, but rather wonky. Instead of trying to trim down the laminate floors, Mr DIY chose to trim the moldings so the floor pieces could seamlessly fit underneath. Sounds easy enough, but it just took extra time. He used an oscillating tool and  small Dremel saw to slice pieces of the molding where it met the concrete.

We chose to start laying the laminate floors on this side of the room because of those challenges.

Now ladies, here's the best part of a big DIY project like laying floors... Plan a day to go shopping with a friend while your husbands install the flooring! Yes I did!! While I spent the day shopping with a friend at Round Top, her sweet husband stayed behind and he and Mr DIY worked on installing the floors. Thanks Michael and Kelsie...we owe you!

Mr DIY and I have done several projects together, and it's usually best if I stay out of the house altogether hahaha. I tend to be a bit of a control freak!

Now, back to the floors. It is VERY important to get that first piece exactly right! Otherwise it will throw off your entire room! Even though it's very hard to tell by just eyeballing it, this wall right here where the french doors are is wonky, crooked, not square...whatever the correct terminology is. I'm so glad these guys had the patience to get it right!

After that, it went fairly quickly and I love how the floors look against our Timberchic wood walls! It's a great combination of modern and rustic.

Watch this short video to see how the pieces literally snap together.

Mr DIY did a great job lining up the pieces of laminate so they matched (see video). We did alternate rows. This not only looks uniform, but saves on wood and time because several pieces can be cut to the same length at the same time. The guys used a chop saw to trim the planks to length.

Over the next couple of days, Mr DIY finished the floors...our son Kyle was a huge help. If you are working on a small room, you can probably finish in a day, but our spaces were very large.

I've shared teaser posts on Instagram (you can follow me here if you aren't already) of the finished floors and I'll be sharing the full reveal of our farmhouse laminate floors in a few days, but here are a couple pictures to give you an idea of how they turned out!


We painted and installed quarter round around the perimeter of the rooms. It gives a beautiful finished look. Still to do...caulking and touch up paint!

But just take a gander at these beautiful floors...aren't they the perfect floors for our modern farmhouse? I love the color and variation.


I hope this post is helpful if you're planning to install laminate floors somewhere in your home! 

Pin it to remember it!

All the furniture and decor is back in place, and the whole space looks so good! Removing the carpet and installing farmhouse laminate floors was a great idea...a lot of work, yes, but now we can enjoy them for years to come!

And Millie certainly agrees 😉