2 in 1 home reno advice needed.. Apologies for the length.
As per my previous posts, I'm new to this home reno world (I can ask some stupid questions but I'm learning slowly and enjoying it) and would love some advice from some of you experts to tackle my living room now.
I have a combustion fireplace sitting on a slate hearth (similarly to this pic – http://orlikheating.com.au/wp-content/uploads/nectre-mega-custom-hearth.jpg). I also have what I'm pretty sure is a wood laminate flooring in this living space.
I recently rendered this living room space (was previously exposed brick) to match the colour paintjob throughout the rest of the house. In the interests of continuing the consistency throughout this house I need to match the floor colour also. The rest of my house has nice darker brown wooden flooring to match the walls. The living has a wood laminate that is more a beech colour. I want to change this so it matches the colour (as best as possible) with the rest of the house.
I am happy with the floor choice as it's a high traffic area and would prefer to keep the floor choice to the wood laminate due to it's durability and the fact that I have a little one happy to scratch anything. I have read that it is possible to stain wood laminate flooring but I have also heard that it is hard due to the fact that you cannot sand back the flooring like you would wooden floorboards. So can I change the colour of this wood laminate and if so how? Worst case scenario is to rip it up and install another laminate with the darker colour although obviously the easier and cheaper option is to stain if possible?
Which moves me to the second issue. Irrespective of what solution I go for above, I need to remove the slate hearth underneath my fireplace so that all the floor can be exposed for my floor solution. I only really (stupidly) realised recently that it's movable and not fixed into the ground during the render job. So how does someone remove one? Youtube hasn't been much of a help unless someone can find one? I assume the combustion fireplace needs to be propped up onto something so that the slate hearth can be removed? And the fireplace would need to continue to be propped up with props adjusted as needed whilst the floor is stained or replaced? I definitely do not want to dismantle the fireplace and reassemble later.
Any advice I would most appreciate. Once again, apologies for the length and hope this doesn't bore anyone and serves as a learning for novices like myself.