Replacing Your Kitchen Floor

Ceramic, Vinyl or Hardwood

When you're remodeling your kitchen, which is better, doing it yourself or hiring an experienced local contractor to do it for you?

In the pages that follow, we'll take you step by step through a Kitchen Remodeling project and discuss the pros and cons of doing it yourself. We'll also contrast the costs of doing it yourself with those costs associated with hiring a contractor for the full job or only parts of it.

Here's a quick summary of what's coming.

Our kitchen remodeling project began before Christmas 2007, when the cabinets, countertops, some appliances, the floor and wallcovering were all at least ten years old, and some of it way older. We discussed the idea of hiring a contractor, but I was sure that it would be lots of fun and cheaper to do it myself. I'll be listening to other, wiser voices in the future.

In the first section, we describe the actual process of replacing the old flooring, what we encountered in the course of taking the old floor up, and what steps we took in replacing the floor. Many of the tasks are a part of the "worst case scenario", which is definitely what we encountered. Hopefully, all of these steps won't be required of you, especially if your home is newer OR in better condition than ours was at the outset.