Gameroom flooring

We went back and forth about which type of flooring to use in the gameroom.  The front hallway leading to the room has a light colored tile and the rest of the house has a natural hickory wood floor that is also pretty light.  However, in my mind, a gameroom should be darker.  We didn't want to pick a different type of wood so close to the other wood and we did not want carpet.  So we went with cork!  We have used cork before in our main house in both the bathroom and kitchen.  It is a very comfortable floor to walk on and it doesn't show much wear.  After shopping around I ordered the cork from ifloor.com  It is a click together product that comes in 12 x 24 in pieces.

First I removed the carpet and the carpet tacks.  Cutting the carpet into strips and rolling it up is the easiest way for me to remove carpet.  The pieces I end up with are manageable so I am not wrenching my back trying to deal with a massive piece of carpet. Then I patched the divots left in the concrete subfloor left by the carpet strips. After sweeping and vacuuming, it was time for flooring:

The first couple rows of flooring is always the hardest, no matter what type of flooring you choose.  It took a lot of trial and error, Youtube and a call to the manufacturer before I really got the hang of things.  In reality, the thing that helped the most was making my own tapping block out of a scrap piece of floor.  None of my sources mentioned this one but I had done it before with previous floors.  Because the tongue and groove on this flooring is fairly fragile, you do not want to try to tap it into place with something that doesn't fit perfectly.  So I made a block out of an end piece, I could put it against the piece I was fitting and pound away at the block.  Once I got that system going, the flooring only took a few more hours.  Here is an example of a tapping block.  I went through several

Here is the first half of the room done.  As you can see, there is a vapor barrier under the flooring just to make sure the concrete slab does not allow moisture into the floor.

And more progress into the other half.

The last row can be difficult to wedge into place





And Voila!

Just a note about the importance of the edges and corners.  A couple of the boxes I ordered got damaged during dropoff at my house.  I actually watched the guy scrape them with his truck.  He acted like it was no big deal, as did the company when I first called about it.  However, be careful with this.  If I had not ordered a full box extra, I would not have been able to finish my floor.  They tell you to use those pieces as "end pieces" where you don't need a full piece.  However, you will find that the part you end up discarding is generally the center part, not the edges.Of course this depends on the width of your room, but in my case, I needed 7 full tiles across and then one just slightly less than half.  The other half I cut off went to start the next row - it was not a discard.  And the corners are the most important parts of the piece!  It was frustrating talking to them.

By the way, the company was willing to send out a replacement box but I eventually decided that I didn't need it, just barely.

I'm back!

Sorry for the disappearing act.  I last posted right around spring break when we knocked out a wall to join two rooms into one larger gameroom.  Then life happened   While we were still getting some work done, I found it impossible to find time to blog between cracking the whip re: end of the year grades, summer vacation, trips, dog problems and generally having my kids around 24/7.  So, now that we are in the first week of school, I am getting caught up with things I have neglected over the past few months.

We are almost done with the gameroom except some furnishings, but I'll be posting as if I am now doing the work  We have also started demo on the giant bathroom that will become two bathrooms, but more on that later.

So here is where we left off.  My husband and I wrestled this giant beam into place to take the load of the wall we removed.

I had to put stain blocker on an old water spot on the ceiling and repaint.

Since this room, and most of the house for that matter, has paneling over unfinished sheetrock, we decided to take the easy way out and paint the paneling.  Not only does that let us avoid having to finish all the sheetrock, it allow for cuts in the sheetrock to move electrical which can be easily covered up by the paneling.  We were able to use the removed paneling to cover the beam.  This paneling would never be my choice as it has intentional pock marks all over it as if it were weathered wood.  However, the upside is that imperfections blend right in!







Then it was time to choose a paint color.  We tried a lot of different options and actually didn't pick any of these but picked a color very close to the khaki color in the bottom rightof this picture.

(Please ignore all the junk, this had become our storage room!)

Here is the room, cleared of junk and painted. (I'll post some better pictures later)  Notice the pony wall on the right.  These walls originally went up to about 5 feet with spindles connecting to the ceiling.  Blech!   You can see a little of this in the first picture above.  It made my kids want to put in saloon doors.  Uh, no. 

So we cut the walls down to counter height.  They were not load bear, just decorative.  This solution allowed us to keep the same flooring on the near side of the wall which is a tile.  The lower height will allow for cue sticks to be used above the wall when needed (more about the pool table later).  We are going to put shallow countertops on these short walls to allow pool players to set their drinks down.  Hopefully we are looking at doing a penny finish on the countertops like this:

I'll let you know how that goes.  Next up, flooring!