Basement Floor

Just a quick post about our basement floor. (I'm avoiding the bathroom floor, have been for days). After mulling the choices, we ended up using laminate floor for the basement. Wall to wall carpet just sounded like a bad idea with 3 dogs and 2 cats. I wanted something that could be cleaned and area rugs are perfect for that. So hard surface floor it was. Now at some point in the basement's shady past there was a mini flood. There were water stains on the studs inside the walls, but only on the east side of the house. This is the side that sits into the slope so it made sense, water migrating through the ground down the hill would eventually run into that wall. Always hoping for the best but planning for the worst, I wanted to make sure the floor would not be completely ruined by a little dampness or water. Here's what I did. I collected samples of the different flooring I liked, different brands, colors, materials, prices. I marked them with a sharpie "wet" on one end and "dry" on the other. Then I put them in bowls of water with the dry end sticking out and left it for a few days. It's amazing to see what happens to some of the flooring. The winner was an Ikea laminate (can't remember the name but I tested a few Ikea samples), as luck would have it, the cheapest of the whole bunch ($1.15/sqft). I was glad I labeled the ends because you could not see a difference between the wet and dry ends on this sample. So I'm pretty confident if we have biblical flooding come spring, my floor will eventually dry out and look good (though, admittedly, it might not smell so good)