One Room Challenge {Week Three} – How to Install Vinyl Plank Flooring

Adding vinyl plank flooring to your home? Follow these five simple steps to install vinyl plank flooring in a short period of time.

I can’t believe it’s week three of this amazing whirlwind of a challenge!  That makes us half way done already – Eek! If you missed it, a couple weeks I kicked off the One Room Challenge, by shared my plans to renovate our Modern Industrial Guest Bedroom. I have three more weeks of the #OneRoomChallenge to create my beautiful space, along with a ton of other amazing designers and bloggers. Visit Calling it Home to be inspired by all of the decor! I’m sharing all of our progress today, including 5 Simple Steps for How to Install Vinyl Plank Flooring. 

Week 1 / Week 2 / Week 3 / Week 4 / Week 5

In this post we discuss installing side-by-side vinyl plank. If you are wondering about installing click or tongue and groove vinyl plank, watch THIS VIDEO!

In case you’ve forgotten, here’s where we started (minus all the furniture). Horrible walls, carpets, blinds, and light fixtures. We basically needed to fix EVERYTHING. We may have been a bit over-ambitious when deciding to renovate this room in only 5 days. I’m still hopeful that we’ll be ready for reveal day though!

Step One

Remove old flooring. With carpet, you just have to grab the carpet with pliers and pull it away from from the tack strips on the walls. Most other flooring can be cut and then pried up with a pry bar and a mallet.

Step Two

Clean your floors. This means removing the old nail strips with a pry bar and hammer, or scraping off old glue with a glue remover (or a putty knife and Varsol).

Step Three

Make sure your floors are level. Luckily our floors were in really great shape, but if there are bumps, or uneven spots on your floor you should address this. I recommend a self-leveling grout. If there are bumps, you may need to consider installing sub-flooring or grinding down the bumps with a diamond grinding disc and a grinder.

We placed our flooring down on the basement floor, and I was a bit concerned about the temperature, but it’s actually very nice – I’m glad we didn’t spend the extra money on a subfloor that wasn’t necessary!

Step Four

Add glue. Put glue down along the perimeter of the room. If you want the flooring to be permanent, you can start laying it right away. If you want to be able to remove it (like we did! In case a board gets damaged.), then let the glue dry for a couple of hours before starting to lay down the planks.

Step Five

Lay your flooring. You want to lay your flooring so that all of the lines are staggered, and there is a minimum of 7″ between joints in adjacent rows. We used a measuring tape to measure the distance of the pieces, used a speed square to make a straight line, and cut with an X-Acto knife. Once cut, the boards easily broke over our knees. You can make the cuts on a table saw, but this is MUCH easier, and works just as well.

Once the flooring was done, it was time to tackle the trim and mouldings! Honestly, we haven’t gotten to the trim yet, but we did replace the ugly old pony wall mouldings with new straight edged sleek mouldings.

We pre-painted everything so that it would look pretty. Then we cut them and nailed them in place. Lastly, we puttied all of the holes. Now we just have to get the rest of the trim up, and paint it all one more time! <insert my panicked face here>. We are running out of time!

Finally, time to start on some decor! I couldn’t wait to search for DIY light fixtures this week. Can’t imagine why I would’ve wanted to replace this old boob light?!

I gathered up some of my FAVOURITE Industrial lighting options from the amazing 1STOPLighting (or Canada Lighting Experts), and shared them on the blog a couple of days ago.

Did you guess which one I chose? Top left!! I really wanted an industrial pendant light, and I didn’t want anything too big because I was worried that it would overpower the small basement space.

*HAPPY MAIL*
My light arrived already and I LOVE it! Can’t wait to install this one!

I also got creative this week and made these amazing DIY Industrial Wall Sconces. I made two so that I could have one on each side of the bed. Pop on over to the post and let me know what you think!

Don’t forget to find more great Industrial Ideas by following my Pinterest Board.

Here’s how we are doing on our lengthy Industrial Guest Bedroom To-Do List:

• Clear room
• Paint walls
• Paint ceiling, trim, and doors
• Install new flooring
• Install new trim
• Install pendant light
• Buy a new rug
• Buy new bedding
• Put up faux brick wall
• Buy new pendant light
• DIY new bedside lights
• DIY side table refresh (done!)
• Install new blinds
• Make DIY Valence
• DIY headboard
• Build DIY sideboard
• Build DIY Towel Rack
• Find/thrift room accessories
• DIY or buy new artwork

What do you think of our plans?