We finally decided to get rid of the old carpets in our basement and replace them with laminate floor. The carpets had a subfloor, which was a sponge that basically fell apart as we tore it out. This, and the carpet, was a major source of dust at our place.

For the new floor we decided to go with a simple subfloor, which comes in 2 by 2 foot pieces and can be locked together. The bottom part of the subfloor is plastic with a pattern that creates an air cushion between the concrete and the wood. It’s also made in Canada.

The slowest part of this project is to do the final edges. In my case I had to cut the wood to a pattern of our wall, which is made out of stone. There also needs to be about a 1 cm gap between the walls and the wood. Similarly, we laid inter-locking pieces of laminate on top of the subfloor and finished with a baseboard all the way around the room.

The breakdown:
$6 per 2′ x 2′ subfloor
$0.8 per 1′ x 1′ laminate
$5 per 8′ baseboard

For a 10′ x 11′ room it cost us $350 and about a day of work.