# Yet another rennovation project!



## FatherHooligan (Mar 27, 2008)

*How much laminate flooring can a minivan haul? If a minivan can haul laminate?!?*

I am not entirely sure how a bathroom rennovation turned into a complete refit of the main floor carpet to hardwood; a refurbishing of our son's closet and a total replacement of gross white berber in our basement to laminate but it has! If you have ever wondered if you can fit and carry 950 square feet of laminate flooring in the back of a Toyota minivan rest assured it is possible.

Jenn the kids and I had to travel into Winnipeg for a meeting for my work (we still like to go to the 'big city' once in while). The afternoon before I noticed that one of the stores was selling the laminate we'd been looking at in the winter to replace the carpet in our basement (we are not carpet fans) at a huge discount (about 30% of the regular price). So we tried to buy it here in Brandon, but they were out of stock and can't have it brought in from Winnipeg but they have to order it from their central office (in Vancouver). We didn't want to wait that long and risk missing the sale and since we were going to Wpg anyway we thought we'd buy it there. We needed 40 boxes and were pretty confident it would fit in the back behind the kids seats and still be low enough not to block the windows. As we are driving to Winnipeg we got to thinking about just how big of a shipment this would be (in two hours you have a lot of time to think  Jenn had read the specs on the box and apparently the boxes are 55 X 3 X 10 and weigh 42 pounds each. Now being the concrete linear thinker that I am I focused on just getting the 40 boxes into the van, not thinking about how much they would weigh! About half way to Wpg the little light bulb went on in my head 'Hey 40 X 42 pounds is 1680 pounds!" We discussed this rather late and significant realization for much of the rest of the trip (other than admiring the horses and cows and remarking on how much crop land is not cropped or suffering horribly from the excessive moisture). We got to the store, purchased the laminate and had the helpful fellows load it into our van. I also came to the realization that I am accepting that I am old enough not to want to load 1700 pounds of laminate by my self and I let the young 'uns do the heavy lifting for me ;-) They must have bust themselves laughing at us thinking the our Sienna would drag its guts out at the first bump…it was sitting really low but the folks at Toyota sure know what they are doing as the van handled that 1700 pounds two kids and Jenn and I without too much complaining (I only scraped the mudflaps once leaving the parking lot!)

I went off to my meeting and Jenn and the kids went toy looking/shopping at a big box toystore that we don't have in Brandon, with me advising Jenn not to drive around too much. She looked at the wheel wells just clearing the rubber and said she figured her and the kids would sit tight at the toy store and wait for me to get out of my meeting.

After my meeting Jenn and I figured we'd drop half the load off at my brothers and take half home tonight. I am super impressed that we didn't do serious damage to the van and it carried the half load home at 100 kph no problem! Now I just have to unload it after work tonight (oh yeah I got called back in to work by my supervisor even though I was ~3 hours away…!).

It looks like I have to go, thanks for reading my long winded blog!


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## Robb (Aug 18, 2007)

FatherHooligan said:


> *How much laminate flooring can a minivan haul? If a minivan can haul laminate?!?*
> 
> I am not entirely sure how a bathroom rennovation turned into a complete refit of the main floor carpet to hardwood; a refurbishing of our son's closet and a total replacement of gross white berber in our basement to laminate but it has! If you have ever wondered if you can fit and carry 950 square feet of laminate flooring in the back of a Toyota minivan rest assured it is possible.
> 
> ...


This totally sounds like something I'd do. I think it runs in the family too; my parents bought three skids of bricks at an auction, then we had to figure out how to get them home. They ended up paying a heavy equipment mover to get them on a flat bed semi. Quite the adventure!


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