Introduction
Our house in Terre Haute is over a hundred yearsv old. In 2026, my wife has lived in it for 43 years, and I've lived here for 25. We have always had cats around the house and do not make people take their shoes off when they visit us.
For years we had some horrible dark green carpet throughout the house and linoleum (lino) in the kitchen. Our back room had nothing but a polished concrete floor. Starting around 2000, we decided to tear out the manky carpet and replace the lino with something else.
Removing the Carpet
The old green carpet had been down for at least 40 years, and it was horrible. It had a been a good quality carpet so it wasn't wearing out but it covered in various stains, the underlay was wearing thin and bits of it was sticky and smelled.
Getting it up and disposed of was a horrible job. The underlay had disintegrated into dust, and getting the carpet grip strips up without damaging the underlying floor was difficult.
We got really lucky with the underlying floor, it was hardwood strips and in most rooms, apart from some small stains, was almost perfect. As I removed the carpet from each room, I sanded down the hardwood flooring and varnished it. There were all sorts of things I could have done with it, but I chose the simplest and easiest.
Getting all the rooms where I could restore the hardwood floor done took a little over a year, but they do look good.
Getting rid of all the old carpet wasn't that difficult. What I did was drag it outside and cut it into 2ft wide strips with a sawzall or whatever else was handy. I put all the rolled up strips into the garage and got rid of them one or two at a time in the household trash.
One of our hardwood floors
Replacing the Lino
Like the carpet, the lino had been down for years, and like the carpet, was not in the best of states. What we decided to do was replace it with rolls of vinyl. We thought we had made a good choice but it turned out we hadn't.
When they were laying it, the contractors had to put joins in some places. These looked great at first but within a couple of years there was dirt accumulating in the joins we couldn't get rid of. The flooring also started to show signs of wear and various scratches started appearing.
Laminate Flooring
There are horror stories about laminate flooring, especially the older types. Some of the stories involve the laminate warping, bubbling, separating, moving, shrinking or expanding. These stories put me off using it for years.
Around 2020, we started looking at the various types that were available.
We have a largish back room that is 17ft x 27ft. This was a later addition to the house and sits on a concrete slab. The floor was never finished properly but the top of the concrete slab was polished. Over the yers the concrete had become stained and looked unsightly. We had thought of several ideas of what to d owith the floor, such as painting it, putting down some sort of rubber flooring and so on. In the end this was the first room we had laminate flooring put down in.
The flooring looked great and still does.
After a few years we got fed up with the vinyl flooring we had put down in the kitchen and hallway. It was scuffed in places and there were scratches in it we couldn't do anything about. This too was later removed in 2025, and replaced with laminate planks.
Laminate flooring. Back room on the left and kitchen on the right
We had the laminate flooring put down by contractors. It took them about a day to do each room. When they left, both sets of contractors left us the offcuts and a box or two of unused laminate.
Basement Landing
Of course there were a few odd jobs that we could have asked the contractors to do but didn't think of until after they had gone.
We have a hallway that runs from the kitchen to the front of the house, off of that are the basement stairs, and on top of those is a small landing. The landing was originally covered inthe same lino as the kitchen and on top of part of that was tackd a piece of carpet. Both had been there many years and both were filthy. It started to annoy me looking at it everytime I walked past it.
In the end I decided to use some of the offcuts and new planks the kitchen contractors had left us and cover the landing with those. Doingthis was a little more awkward than the relatively large space of the kitchen as the measuements and cutting had to be more accurate.
What I did have to do was make a quick trip to Menards and buy 9ft of stair edging to to finish the stairs off. I don't think I made too bad a job of it.
The finished basement landing
Door Threshhold
We did have a small problem with a door opening onto the hallway. Because the laminate flooring was slightly higher than the old vinyl we had, the door kept sticking. Rather than risk scratching the flooring, I decided to saw a little off the bottom of the door.
Looking at the old threshold I could see that there were two problems. The first was the general height of the floor had been raised and there was also something wring with the old threshold. It had split and so screwing one part down was raising the other side up and causing the door to stick.
Another quick trip to Menards to get a new threshold and some draft excluder.
