What kind of flooring? Vinyl should be easy enough, wood is harder.

What I have seen isn't too bad to install, although I havent done it. You put down glue and match the pieces, cut to fit and run trim around the bottom. If you have a Lowes or Home Depot around, they have classes on installing some of their stuff.

Look into Laminates , Pergo , Wilsonart ,  etc ...

They are relatively easy to install yourself since its a floating system . Stick to
the higher end cost wise for durability , the cheap stuff edge chips and have
funky colored sub laminate like green , red , blue and looks like crap when it shows .

Don't get the fake laminate stuff.  It looks cheap, like a picture of wood.  Plus it sounds hollow when you walk over it.  I dont mean to offend people because alot of people have the laminate, but there is no comparison to the real thing.

Get the real thing, 2-1/4" wide red oak or white oak.  Yes it is expensive, about $6.00/sf if someone does it for you or about $3.00 if you do it.  But it is worth it particularly if you are going to stay in the house for a while.  You will never have to replace it.  

If you decide to do it yourself, be ready for a pretty tough job, hard on your back.  Also caution must be used when sanding as to not gouge the wood with the sander.  I laid the wood in my dining room and had a guy finish it for me.  Since then we have had wood put in the living room and upstairs hall and I paid someone to do the complete job.  After you add up the cost of all the rental tools you have to get it is easier to just let someone do it.  

Just cut back on your gun purchases for a month or 2 and you will be able to afford it.

Cheers

What kind of subfloor do you have?

I installed the pre-finished "Bruce" brand oak hardwood in my kitchen and dining room. It still looks new after 6 years with 2 kids! It's not difficult to install, just be sure to install it across the floor joists, not parallel with them and break up the joints in the flooring. You can rent the tools from most any tool rental store - the manual nailer is a lot harder to use - get the air operated nailer. Shop around for materials, it should run about $3.25 - $4.00 per square foot and add about 5% or so for waste.edited to add you'll need a good miter saw to cut the wood properly!

Look at the "engineered" wood flooring. It IS real wood but thinner than traditional flooring. It can either be glued down or floated over a slab. Remember that the wood will increase the height of the floor as well. You can refinish some of the better brand engineered wood flooring a couple of times before they need replacement...more than sufficient for most homes for twenty or more years. Real, traditional wood flooring is nice, but you will have to put down 3/4 plywood first, then nail to that, so you are looking at about a 1 1/2 in. height increase there. That can get complicated in an existing home. If you decide to have it done, be aware that HD and BLowes usually do not have really good installers subbing for them...go to a flooring place or look in the yellow pages, then get references...even take a look at an install if you can. There are many excellent craftsmen doing flooring work...and even more klutzes who have no idea of what the fuck they are doing at all! Be very, very careful of "price shopping" as you will live with this stuff a long time.

You can use a floating laminate, pretty easy. You can glue down a wood floor, work fast, or you can overlay the slab with OSB to a thickness of min. 3/4 inch and staple a wood floor. I like to staple costs about .06 cent a foot by far the least expensive. Stay away from Home Depot go to a flooring place to get your materials. Try Manington. It's to early for this stuff I cant type until I have had coffee!

just put 600 sq ft of it in my addition (laminate)  it looks pretty good- is durable and almost impossible to scratch.  Ours is calle Unillusion "knowlton oak"  it has a sort of "grain" cut into the pieces to make it reflect and look more like real wood.  it is easy to lay-if you have read the instructions!!!

on a slab you will need the thin vapor block padding too- its not tha expensive- about 40 bucks for your area.

i decided to NOT have it installed because it was over twice as much.

you should be able to do that area for under 500 bucks

I did our kitchen with engineered wood.  It's basically 3/4" plywood with a 3/16" layer of oak on top.  It's a floating floor system.  It's pretty easy to put down.  If you can run a table saw and a miter box, it will be no problem for you.  Just remember to measure twice and cut once.  

The stuff I put down is Harris Tarkett.  They sell it at Home Depot for roughly $4/sq ft and it doesn't look like photographed wood like the pergos.  I've had it in for about three years now, and I have a dog.  It gets scratched eventually like all wood floors, but the finish is holding up fantastic.  



The other thing you could do is a real wood floor.  It's more difficult, and requires sanding and finishing after installation.  It will stink for a couple weeks.  And the finish isn't as hard as the factory applied and baked stuff.  I have that in other portions of my house and would not recommend trying it yourself.

BTW, my kitchen remodel was about 180 sq ft with lots of corners and I put the floor down in about 6 hours.  A square area you could do 600 feet in a day no problem.  Odd shaped rooms might take the whole weekend, but certainly doable.

More on my kitchen project can be found here:

Kitchen Project

Nice project, Fast351.  Good look.
It's amazing what a new kitchen will do for the value of your home.
And the improved "live-ability" for you.

I'm in the middle of remodelling my house and doing all the bedrooms and hallways in wood then doing the living room, dining room and kitchen in tile.  I'm using the Bruce engineered stuff.  It is 3/8 thick hard wood plywood and the top layer has a polyurethane finish,  The pieces interlock with a tongue and groove and you can use either nails or adhesive to attach it to the subfloor.

It is easy to install but gets hard on the back with all the bending over and crawling around.  A good set of kneepads makes it easier.  The two most important tools are a belt sander to smooth any rough edges on the subfloor and a table saw so you can cut pieces to fit.  I've also got a roto-zip that makes it easy to cut the pieces that need to fit around a door or whatever.  The other tool that is nice is a 'reversing back saw'  It is a small handsw that has the handle on the side so that it can be laid flat and cut sideways.  It is used when you need to cut the molding around the door so that the wood will fit underneath.

It looks great and is much more comfortable than carpet.

I don't have any pics of whole rooms but it's the background of these pics: