We wanted one type of flooring throughout our home, after having seven different types of carpet, tile, and laminate in our previous one. It needed to be waterproof to be in all baths and the kitchen, and luxury vinyl plank fit the bill. After having a floating floor, it was decided that a glue down product would fit our wants and needs this time around. A dozen trips to stores yielded us with the color, material, and value we were looking for.
The first step after making a selection is ordering and taking delivery of your product. We ordered 2200 sqft of material, which happened to be a full pallet that weighed about 2700 lbs. I needed to commit to a landing zone for the material, since it wasn’t getting moved unless it was being installed.
We wanted the flooring to run in one direction, and the full length of the house was the orientation we decided to do. The next consideration was to align the entire floor plan to the home dimensions, with the goal of eliminating narrow pieces as much as possible in the hallway and edges of the slab. Here I measured a chalk line down the exact center of our hallway, that also happened to maximize floor dimensions on the edges of the home.
Here you can see my second chalk line, which was mocked up as well. It didn’t give the results I was looking for, but I had to know before committing to glue down! Here the first run of glue and flooring is lining up with my line.
This flooring was easy to work with, but very unforgiving on the edges. Gaps as small as a few 0.001″s can be seen across a single plank.
In hindsight it was very daring to start the floor in this manner, but the results were worth the effort.
The home run guide is taking shape, and was needed to start laying flooring into the guest rooms.
My “chicken nuggets” being stacked to avoid doubles as much as possible.
Phillip’s room is starting to come together.
It was a painstaking process: mock up the floor pieces to prevent duplicates near each other, mark a line, lay the glue, let it skim per instructions, then lay the floor down.
Glue! We used four gallon pails of Roberts 6300 pressure sensitive adhesive. This is used in commercial applications with the added ability of service in mind. If you need to replace a plank (and I did replace one after i damaged it unexpectedly) it can be peeled up, and a new one laid down. You can see this pail was beat up upon delivery… yet another of many, many damaged goods we received. I ended up getting a new bucket and lid to salvage this one, this glue skimmed up and needed to have a tight seal.
Laying the glue with a 1/16×1/16 trowel became a bit tedious after a while, and I completely wore out one trowel, and ate halfway through a second. I also had to improvise a third one to get into some tight areas based on my backword method of starting in the center. And no, I didn’t leave those big globs to go under the planks…
My first repair :b I opened a box of closet rods, and one fell out and made a perfect circle puncture in the a plank. With everything new, I could stand to have it damaged.
My first major challenge was converging measurements from our den back to the hallway. I laid down dozens of planks as a guide, but without them being glued down, I had a small skew that needed to be corrected. This meant peeling up and reinstalling more planks than I cared to do.
Another bathroom being worked on. Believe it or not, the small areas were more work than the large ones since so many cuts needed to be made.
My second converging set of planks. I worked slow and methodically here, and only needed to adjust two planks! I felt like that was a major win.
Flooring went in everywhere there was slab, no shortcuts were made here. This is the cabinet for our wine fridge.
Nearly six months after the floor started, it was finally getting close to completion.
The last run of planks is in, from May 31 through November 21.
13 months later, and the floor looks amazing and has taken everything we and our herd have thrown at it! Phillip has taken a few liberties with crayons and markers as well 😉