Our Most Time Consuming Job

Steph and I both love the look of hardwood. It can transform a space and take it to a completely different level. However, we were worried our budget after carpet would be too shy to show off hardwood floors. So we started to look at some alternatives. As much as we would have loved hardwood, we decided that a more fiscally conservative approach would be more appropriate. After looking at exactly 2,037 (possibly exaggerated number) flooring companies, we found a suitable alternative. Ready for it? It's called LVT. GASP! What's that you say? It's an affordable and quite striking alternative to hardwood. LVT stands for Luxury Vinyl Tile but as you probably noticed, the kind we got is a wood texture, not tile. Also, it comes in single planks so it doesn't have that fake seam look like some laminate.

The brand we decided on is Engage. We got it from a flooring place by Thanksgiving Point called Floorcraft Design. We HIGHLY recommend them. We worked with Scott and he was really nice and very straight forward. They did our carpet too. We looked at a lot of places and they had the best prices and made sure we understood everything.

The flooring is 100% vinyl, not a combination of vinyl and laminate. It's waterproof, yes that's right, waterproof so it's easy to clean. It's also extremely scratch resistant. Even rocks in the bottom of your shoe won't scrape it. The kind we got is 5 mm thick. It comes in a locking version and an adhesive strip version. We decided that the locking version was the smartest due to ease of installation and the fact it would stay put.

There are a lot of different types, so there were plenty to choose from. When we were shopping for just the right color and grain, we were drawn to darker woods and even after discussions with friends and family about the difficulty of keeping dark wood clean, we decided on a dark walnut for our floors. And guess what. It is definitely difficult to keep clean.

We ordered about 860 square feet of flooring the day after we closed on the house. We decided to install the flooring ourselves to save money. If you think 860 sounds like a lot of flooring to put in yourself you're wrong. It's a RIDICULOUS amount of flooring to put in yourself! After ripping up the carpet and preparing the sub floor we laid out the vinyl to acclimate to the temperature and humidity of our house. Even though this process is needed for any type of hard flooring, vinyl doesn't contract and expand as much as other types of flooring.

We were told we could install the floor in one afternoon. That would have been nice, but it ended up taking us about 8 hours a day for 8 days straight (including a full day on Saturday). My knee had enough after those 8 days! We were asked if we could do this all over again, if we would choose to just have someone install it. We both said no. Despite how long it took, I enjoyed using my hands and being able to say I installed them myself. And Steph enjoyed saving the money.

We also had to remove the 3/8 inch raised particle board sub floor in the kitchen, pantry, entry and storage room that the linoleum was glued to. (I enjoyed the manliness of this part.)

My sweet parents even came down from Rexburg for a couple days to help out. My Dad helped me with the floor and my Mom helped paint. (You can also catch a glimpse of the paint color in our entry from that photo.)

Kitchen right after install

Notice the gaps between the floor and the cabinets? It's from the sub floor we ripped out. The new flooring at 5 mm is shorter than the 3/8 inch particle board and linoleum so it created an unsightly seam at the base of the cabinets. Don't loose sleep over it though. In an upcoming post we'll show our solution to that problem.

Close up of the grain of the vinyl floor.

Dining area/ kitchen

People who have come over say the floor looks just like hard wood. And we agree. We are very happy with our choice and think the LVT we chose brings the perfect amount of simplicity and elegance we hoped for in our new home.

Subscribe to the blog so you don't miss any of our posts! We'll be showing even more flooring as we get to individual rooms so stay tuned! It looks amazing!