Millions of families all over the world did home improvement during the never ending lockdown, mine was no different. My family and I did many home improvements ourselves, however I found the hardest thing to do was lay down hardwood flooring since we were inexperienced. 

Putting down flooring was the hardest out of all the home improvement projects I did with my family. It took us three days to just get the carpet up. I can’t even remember how many trash bags we used.  I used an exacto knife to cut little strips of the carpet and the underlay so I could pull it up. Being the first time, we laid down hardwood floors, It was a huge struggle trying to figure it out. 

Working in small, hot, and smelly rooms with my whole family started to get so frustrating. During this home improvement I was the one who ripped up 90% of the carpet. I got so mad when someone would bump into me because it would mess up what I was doing. No matter how many breaks I took, when I got back it was the same thing all over again.

After ripping up all the carpet and the padding underneath,  my mom and I put an odor remover called Kilz to get rid of the smell in my foster brother’s old bedroom. Kilz helped get rid of the foul smell he left behind. It took a whole day to dry. It had to be dry for us to walk on it. After waiting a whole day, I finally went to finish and do a second coat, so it could smell as clean as possible.

Finally, we got to lay down the wood, we used four things. A tapping block, new underlay, the wood, and my dad. At first, dad laid down the underlayment, then my sisters and I lined up the wood to make sure that it would be right where it was supposed to be. After laying it where it was needed, my dad used the tapping block to push them together so there weren’t any gaps between each piece. Even though my family was in dad’s way, we got the floors done and I am in love with them. 

Millions of families all over the world renovated room(s). There were thousands of successes and hundreds of failures. Luckily my family’s renovation was one of the successes, but honestly, if I had a choice to go back and wait to hire someone or do it the way we did. I would rather just hire a professional and make sure it’s done correctly.