Retail Space Laminate Floor

I have been spending full days at my new workshop house, there is just so much to do.

In my last post I said I was trying to find some laminate to patch the floor where I took out the wall and also where the old floor vent was.

  I looked everywhere and could not find anything to work.  I even considered a patch of something different around the front door area that would be covered by a mat.  The more I looked at the old flooring, the more I could see there were many small pieces patched together (and not actually clicked together) in the laminate and I would need to do a huge area as a patch.  I gave up on that idea and decided to buy new flooring.

So I began to take out the laminate in the retail space.  Here is what I found under the doorway.

And then when I took the layer of OSB off:

Isn't the old vinyl floor amazing?  Would that be from the 70s?

Now the patch for the grate area was not so simple.  I had to go downstairs and add two braces between the floor joists, to put the new floor patch onto.  First I cut through the plywood underneath, about 2" all around, to give a ledge for the new floor (OSB) to sit on.  Then I cut the OSB piece to sit on that ledge and I nailed it to the braces underneath.

About stripping all the laminate out of the retail area, this was NOT something I planned on, both time-wise and expense-wise. So I then figured I might as well use the old laminate in one of the bedrooms upstairs that I will use as a storage room.

There are three bedrooms upstairs, all have the same stick-on tile flooring.  Here's the one at the front of the house:

I removed the tiles and the baseboards and started to put the laminate (from the downstairs retail area) up in this room:

As I got to just over the half way mark, I realized that I might not have enough pieces to finish the room.  Many of the pieces were chipped or had damaged edges which would not allow them to click together properly.  I then worked like it was a puzzle, setting out the best pieces where I could trim ends to fit.  After laying them all out where they would go, but before actually cutting and clicking them together, I had it all figured out down to the last piece.  Thankfully it would just work for the size of the room.  Of course, as luck would have it, I cut a piece incorrectly (from the wrong end) and there was no way to use it because I couldn't click the ends to anything, they were both cut!  How disappointing, but I did manage to look through all the scrap pieces again and find a way to work it out with another piece.  What a lot of time, on something I didn't even plan to do.

The room will have to stay painted lilac for now, and the baseboards and window trim all need a coat of paint, but I really need to work on the workshop and retail spaces first!