Oh my goodness! I love our vinyl plank flooring. I never, ever, ever thought I would want a vinyl floor. Growing up, this is what a vinyl floor looked like:
It came on a roll, was glued down, and tore pretty easily.
The luxury vinyl plank flooring we purchased from Lumber Liquidators, is a click and lock flooring, that is thick and floats on top of the subfloor. We bought a variety called Rustic Reclaimed Oak. The flooring was $1.56 per square foot. The link is HERE
The photo below is from super close on the floor.. It looks so realistic that Mr. Math and I both thought that there were tears in the the planks. It was just the wood look. It fooled us from right on top of it. The planks are textured also so they really feel more like wood than you would expect.
We started with a concrete slab. Yep. We have been living with this floor for 6 weeks.
Here are the tools that we used, plus a measuring tape.
Those black things are knee pads. They are a MUST! The rubber mallet helped convince some of the difficult pieces to go into place.
The flooring comes in pretty small boxes but wow are they heavy. Like 40 lbs each heavy times 30 boxes.
Keeping it real for you, there was a definite learning curve. There are some tricks that I will share with you at the end that hopefully you will not have to figure out like we did.
The first step is to measure the floor and figure out how many whole rows you will have. We were lucky. Our floor did not need the first or last row trimmed down to make it work.
The next step is to lay out the first row so you can get started.
Then click and lock. The hard part of clicking and locking is the corner where the two connect.
on the last plank you have to cut it to fit. Cutting is a breeze. Razor knife and straight edge are all that it takes to cut.
As soon as you score the plank, snap and it comes apart.
It is tough to get the first three rows in. The best way to connect the planks is while on the planks and pulling toward the wall. That is impossible on the first three rows. These three rows took 30 minutes of work to get clicked together.
Learning to cut around the little wall and the fireplace took us some time but Mr. Math did a great job. It looks perfect. This is as far as we got on day one. I was a little discouraged. I thought we were going to be working on the floor for weeks.
Day two was a much improved day for the floor. Less yelling, more flooring down.
That was my feet walking on the planks so they did not come loose when Mr. Math was bending and twisting. That is the trick. One person has to stand on the seam where the planks connect end to end while the other person is clicking the long side. Mr. Math was shocked when he found out I video taped him while standing on the flooring. 1 minute, 27 seconds to get 12 linear feet totally finished.
We were cooking with hot grease. Even with a 12:00 football game, we got the flooring in the main room of the house almost finished. We stopped because we are going to have to think about the hallway. The wall is not straight so we need to figure out how we are going to solve the problem. Honestly, I predict that it is going to take us several weekends to finish the whole house. We have to move appliances in the kitchen and laundry room before installing. We will have to remove the toilet to finish the bathrooms, and we have the hallway to contend with.
Putting in the flooring wasn’t as easy as I hoped but it wasn’t as hard as I feared. Here is what we learned from our experience.
- The first three rows are hardest. Don’t give up. When you can get on the floor and pull rather than push it gets easier.
- Getting the corner in is tricky. Mr. Math says make sure the whole thing is on top of the tongue.
- This is a two person job. One to click and lock. One to stand on the board as it locks to keep it in place.
- Make sure the floor is level. We used a dry leveler mix and poured it on low spots.
- Have extra razors for the razor cutter.
We have very little wasted flooring. We are going to end up with enough extra flooring to put it in my craft room. Woo Hoo.
I love the look.
We have already had several folks come look and they are all impressed. I think I won a couple of folks over.
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