We have a little room off our basement laundry/family room that we’ve used as an office, workout room, man cave… many things.  Unfortunately, after we redid the laundry room, the little room became kind of a de-facto storage space — housing a lot of the things that used to be kept in the basement.

We decided to clean out the space, take the stuff off the walls, and add a fresh coat of paint.  I liked the green walls ok, but they needed some patching and we didn’t have the original paint color to touch up, so we opted for a brand new color to reinvent things a little.

I chose Glidden Silver Birch with an eggshell finish– a super light gray with a beige undertone.  (Which is now my most favorite color for interiors at the moment.)

A little note about choosing gray paint — there is no “true gray,” which makes choosing a gray paint color really difficult.  All grays have an undertone to them — the most common undertones being blue, purple, green and beige.  If you gather up a bunch of gray paint chips and hold them up in the space you’re planning to paint, you’ll see the undertone pretty clearly.  A gray that you were sure was “the one” at the store can suddenly be OMGPURPLE in the space you’re planning to paint.  Lesson: paint chips are your friend.  Gather up a lot of them and look at them in multiple spots in the space you’re planning to paint before you go ahead and buy that gallon.

Anyhoo, here’s the space with the freshly painted gray walls:

Nice right?  (It looks awesome in person, if I do say so myself.)

However, despite the amazingness of Glidden Silver Birch, it couldn’t really detract from the glaringly obvious problem of the space:

Oh hey, hideous painted floors.

Whoever had owned the space before us decided to paint the floor in here; and from the looks of it, they also decided to paint without a drop cloth and generally wreck the space while the floor was still wet.

Because, why not?

I approached KC about re-painting the floor, but he had a better idea: installing a floating laminate floor.

We found our flooring on sale at Costco.  It was $25/box and we ended up buying 4 boxes to cover the 6′ x 12′ space (we have most of one box left over).

The flooring was awesome because it came with all the sound proofing already attached to the planks.  (With a lot of laminate flooring, you generally have to buy sheets of soundproofing material that lays down first, then lay the boards over that.)

These are snap-together flooring pieces that you cut to fit with a circular saw.  Word to the wise: make sure you buy the correct saw blade for cutting laminate.  We bought a cheaper blade first and basically burned through it (literally) and had to go back and buy another one in order to finish the room.

KC was in charge of the flooring project, so I sadly don’t have a lot of real-world tips and advice for you.  (Aside from get yourself an awesome husband.  It really pays off.)

KC figured out how to lay the flooring by watching tutorials on YouTube (ah, the power of the internet).

KC installed the flooring over the course of a single day, and finished up the edges the next night by installing white quarter-rounds around the edges to match the white baseboards (since there’s a little gap between the boards and the edge of the wall):

Um, a bit of an improvement, no?

I’ll have more pictures of the finished space up next week!