Durable and cheap flooring advice

[Zachary Hoyt]

I have been trying to figure out flooring for the house I am going to be repairing and moving into in the spring/summer. It's about 100 years old with two layers of softwood T&G boards in most of the house. The kitchen is in a single story area where the floor rotted away due to the roof leaking while the house was abandoned for several years, so I will have a 3/4" plywood subfloor in there. It's a small house, with about 850 square feet of floor area.

I'm trying to find something that I can use on the floors that will be (1) durable enough so I don't have to take off my shoes every time I come in, (2) reasonably cheap, but that is flexible, and (3) not entirely hideous. For the last 20 years I have lived in a converted barn with plain concrete on the first floor and painted plywood above, except for commercial vinyl tile in the kitchen and bathrooms, so my standards for hideous are very low. I am passionately anti-carpet, but am open to any other ideas. I've thought about LVP or cabin grade hardwood, but am not sure about the durability, and I am doubtful about tile since the subfloor is not entirely smooth, being old softwood boards.

I'll be very grateful for any advice on what to get. I won't be ready to put it in till June but I want to make my plans ahead of time, as I will be too busy doing the other house repair jobs to think about it, once spring comes.

[Kev Williams]

We bought a mobile home in 2007, and in 2009 I remodeled the kitchen--
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Had a guy do the cabinets, I did everything else. For the flooring, we got the cheapest flooring Ikea sold back then, "Tundra"- We liked it's look, price was right, and 'our' Ikea has several 'test' versions of their flooring in the store that everyone walks on. The cheap stuff looked like new even after lord knows how much traffic it got. Don't know if 'tongue and groove' is the right name, but it does lock together, and it 'floats' on an 1/8" foam underlayment. We lived in it for 2 years, our son lived in it for 5 years, and since then we've rented it to some friends. Last time we were there the floor still looks like new, it's near bulletproof as far as traffic goes.

It's one Achilles Heel is, it doesn't like water, UNDERNEATH-- The top side can handle spills and such as long as the water doesn't have time so soak into the seams... but about a week after I put this down, the washing machine in the vestibule blew a hose and flooded the floor! I immediately started removing the planks (which is easy with a floating floor thankfully) near the washer up to about the kitchen sink which was as far as the water got. I only ended up scrapping about 4 planks, those started soaking water and swelling. All the other planks were fine after drying out. And it does still look great after almost 13 years.

[Jim Becker]

There are very nice looking vinyl products available that are easy to install (no gluing) and a lot of choice relative to the look. Easy to clean, too.

[Scott Brader]

My wife and I just finished up a refresh of our house after nearly 30 years of wear and tear. We put down a Pergo floor we picked up at Home Depot throughout the house. It was quite reasonably priced (in our opinion) and looks great. It was pretty easy to install. We put down nearly 1,800 square feet in total between the three living levels of our tri-level home. They have a number of color options available.

[Adam Herman]

we really like the vinyl plank products. even the cheap stuff from home depot held up to a single guy that rented from us for 3 years and his close to 100 lb dog, and then a puppy. we have also used some more expensive version in our own home that was fantiastic. metroflor was the manufacture and it was solid plastic core and did not wear at all even with our 4 large dogs.

[Lee DeRaud]

I put the Pergo water-resistant stuff in when I did the kitchen in 2017, still looks like new despite my strict "benign neglect" cleaning regimen. This is the new(er) "click-and-lock" stuff, which I found was more of a "pound-and-curse" install, but i guess the tight seal between the planks is a feature, not a bug. That replaced a much older glued-seam Pergo from 1999, which was still in pretty good shape except in front of the dishwasher where the old unit had blown a pump seal in a highly entertaining fashion.

That said, if I had it to do over, I'd probably use some of the higher-end vinyl planking. I helped a friend with his kitchen and family room, and the install is much easier, like maybe 2X-3X as fast. I think my Pergo looks better, but that has more to do with the pattern he picked...it's so smooth the seams disappear and it looks more like a solid sheet. Some of the others I've seen have more texture to them.

[Jerome Stanek]

I put down some water poof flooring from Home depot on me enclosed porch don't worry about mud or water or snow.

[Mel Fulks]

There are good methods that are not much used now. Cuz people “ain’t never heard of that before”. Glue down canvas ,thick or thin and
paint it . Widely use for a long time ,going back to 19th century. Use good acrylic paint ,then coat with polyurethane varnish.

[roger wiegand]

DIY hardwood can be done in the $2-3/sqft range if you scrounge a bit. My shop floor is "mixed domestic hardwoods" that I got for a buck a foot. Finished with Bona Traffic HD it's been very tough, and looks good. The finish cost nearly as much as the wood! If you have nearby mills it's worth asking what they have that's cheap.

[Ole Anderson]

Whatever you get, look for a "ceramic" coating, usually aluminum oxide. Luxury vinyl planking seems to be the standard these days. Not the cheapest, but I put down a ton of stranded bamboo in my home. Hard as nails and almost scratchproof.

[Zachary Hoyt]

Thank you all for your advice. It sounds like LVP is probably the way to go, and it's good to hear from people who have found it durable. I'd like to do actual wood someday, but I hope to only live in this house for maybe 2-10 years and eventually build a house that works better for me, so wood might be too labor intensive to be practical for the short term.

[Tom M King]

The good LVP doesn't fit in the cheap category, but it's great stuff for abuse. After seeing some stand up to every day use in our bank for two years, and still look like it did when they first put it down, we put the same thing in a lake rental house. It was 5.25 a square foot though, so that put it out of the cheap category for me. Coretec Plus was the name, I think. I know it was some sort of Coretec.

[Lee DeRaud]

There is one gotcha with the LVP if you're installing it in a kitchen or bathroom: you can't use rugs/mats with a non-skid rubber backing because they will stain the flooring.

[Zachary Hoyt]

I'm very grateful to you all for your advice. I was looking at the Materials page on Craigslist this morning, as I do every day, and came across a listing for a pallet (or 748 square feet) of Coretec Plus Premium LV planks, 7"x6', in the Noble Oak color, for $1500. I emailed right away and was lucky enough to be the first, though it had been posted last night. They had ordered much too much when building their house, so they had a whole pallet to sell. I may need another box or two, I'll have to do some math, but this is enough to do most of my house.

I went this afternoon and picked it up, about 90 minutes away. I have stacked it in the workshop and there it will stay till May, anyway, but I think it will be well worth the space it takes. Once I get the storage/shop building built up there in the spring I'll move the flooring up there, another 120 miles. I don't know why they called it Noble Oak, I think Cracked Oak From Too Close To The Pith would be more descriptive of the look they are emulating, but it probably wouldn't sell as well under that name. It looks fine, and much more important to me is that it should wear well, from what I can find out, and was quite cheap for what it is. The seller also threw in about 130 square feet of thinner 4' long LVP in a darker color that he said was sent to him by mistake and the company didn't want it back. It is not marked with a brand name, so I don't know what it is. I feel very lucky to have found this flooring in time.

[Tom M King]

That was a good find!

The typical way to put it down is to go one way, which requires the use of a threshold in some doorways. In the rental house I put it in, I didn't want to use thresholds-never do.

I was able to put it down backwards without too much trouble, so there are none of those cover strips anywhere in the house.

[Robert Engel]

There may be other kinds, but the vinyl plank we had installed requires sealing and periodic finish application. We think it will require finish twice a year. We got it b/c we wanted something waterproof.

[Jim Becker]

Zachary, it sounds like you got a nice deal! You may want to be proactive and and calculate your actual sq ft need plus a comfortable contingency and see about sourcing any additional material as soon as practical. Colors/styles sometimes come and go and if matching throughout is important, be sure you have what you need now, even though you do not intend to physically install for awhile.

[Jerome Stanek]

If you do need more put the new stuff in closets

[Rick Potter]

...and use the 'extra' stuff you got with it in the bathroom, or bedroom.

[Tom M King]

This type does not require any future sealing. They're good at keeping the color consistent too. I ordered some to do part of a house we weren't intending to when we did some of the rooms a couple of years before, and even though there were no similar numbers in the batch numbers on the boxes, it was a perfect match.

It is also waterproof. Installation is not as easy to snap together like laminate because it's made to a little bit of an interference tolerance. It's not bad though-just takes some persuasion with the beater block and mallet. I tested it with standing water for several days, and none got down into the joints.

[Zachary Hoyt]

Thank you all for the advice. I do need to do a detailed floor space analysis at some point. It's around 800-850 from the rough numbers, but there are areas that will not be floored, like under the stairs, under the kitchen cabinets, under the woodstove etc. Possibly also where the basement access hatch is. The bedrooms are 8x9 and 9x9 so I have more than enough of the other stuff to do one of them. Each bedroom has a closet, but they are about 18"x30" so I could just put in a piece of painted plywood for the floors to match the baseboards. If I have enough I'll do it all the same, but I don't mind doing one room differently if needed. It's good to know that it can be installed backward, I was thinking about that, or trying to measure back from a chalk line to line it up in the hallway and the bedroom. I found a part number on the random boxes and found that they are Shaw Primavera which HD used to sell for $4 something a square foot, but are now NLA from them. It sounds like they would be plenty good enough for who this house is going to be for, as the saying is.

[Tom M King]

Estwing is normally my first choice, but I ended up liking this Vaughn mallet best for this flooring. Sometimes it needs a bump to get the mating parts together before you rotate it down. The white side of this is perfect. You can bump it too hard though, and damage an edge, so it needs to be close to going together before you bump it.

Either face works fine on the beating block. I had about 3500 feet to cover, so got a feel for it by the time I was finished.

https://www.lowes.com/pd/VAUGHAN-24-oz-Smooth-Face-Rubber-Head-Wood-Rubber-Mallet/3333074?cm_mmc=shp-_-c-_-prd-_-tol-_-ggl-_-SS_TOL_216_Construction-Hand-Tools-_-3333074-_-online-_-0-_-0&gclid=Cj0KCQiAip-PBhDVARIsAPP2xc3Y6YXkfZxHXv3Pfox2K_iMC-nAllyD1ryiVVJzgYPUR-OEjIklNBsaAhDUEALw_wcB&gclsrc=aw.ds


Even multimillion dollar lake houses are using this for flooring here. All of them are intended for rentals, and it's proven to take abuse, and still look good.

[Tom M King]

I used these tapping blocks, and didn't want anything better

https://www.amazon.com/Bullet-Tools-Ergonomic-Professional-Flooring/dp/B004LOF060?ref_=ast_sto_dp&th=1

[Zachary Hoyt]

I have a couple of old mallets with red and green replaceable rubber faces that my grandfather gave me when I was about 5 or 10 along with some other hand tools. One is much bigger and heavier than the other. I'll have to experiment with how to tap, and try to learn from my mistakes. I saw on the installation video from the manufacturer that they used a flat bar with a 90 degree bend at each end to tap the last board in a row, so I'll have to get one of those, and some of those little black spacer things, but I won't be ready to install this floor till June anyway, or maybe even July, so I've got some time left to figure out the details of the plan.

[Tom M King]

Don't buy this tool. It bends too easily for the Coretec flooring. It's for the last pieces that you can't get the tapping block on. I ended up just using a Wonder bar off the baseboard. They make better ones, but I only discovered this was too soft too late to order a good one. The Wonder bar worked fine.

https://www.amazon.com/Heavy-Vinyl-Flooring-Laminate-Installation/dp/B08FQQCMLH/ref=sr_1_65?crid=3T4ADZ556W6GT&keywords=floor+installation&qid=1642614844&sprefix=floor+installation%2Caps%2C77&sr=8-65

I bought a shear, which is great for cutting near where you need to without making a mess, but for a small job, I'd just use a mitersaw, and tablesaw.

After getting your first run of board down, run four or five rows at the time. Saves a lot of walking back and forth.

[Tom M King]

I think the red and green heads make be too hard to directly tap an edge with. That white one on the Vaughn is perfect.

[Zachary Hoyt]

Thanks, that's good to know. I'll see about a Vaughn mallet next time I go to Lowes. I agree about using saws for this small job, it should go pretty quickly. I don't mind a bit of dust, as long as I can keep it away from the face of the floor so it doesn't clog the tongue and groove.

[Rick Potter]

You have to do better than the 'PRO' installer my rental management firm hired to put in vinyl planks in a rental house I have. They removed the old carpet, then installed the soft vinyl right over a dirty floor. I even had a nail that was laying on the floor come up through the new stuff.

I asked the installers about their experience level. "Quien sabe, it's our first time".

The floor was redone by my choice of installer, paid for by the management firm.

[Zachary Hoyt]

I'm sure I can do better than that, anyhow. I have been wondering how smooth the subfloor should be. Most of the house has two layers of old tongue and groove softwood boards, but the kitchen will be new plywood once it has a floor at all. I wonder if I should put down luan or some other kind of thin plywood to smooth out the surface in the main house. The planks I have are 15/32" thick, so they should be relatively robust, I imagine.

[Jim Becker]

That's sad to hear, Rick...installing ANY kind of floor requires careful cleaning and prep. Sheesh...

[Brian Elfert]

If you do a snap lock type floor like the Home Depot Lifeproof flooring be sure to use the little kicker or whatever you call it to close up the gaps. I did not do that in my basement bathroom and it sure looks like a bad DIY job. I need to pull the toilet and redo the flooring. It is less than 30 square feet. I will reuse the pieces, but I have extra if need be. I was in a huge hurry to finish the bathroom for a real estate appraisal so I left it the with the gaps. (No appraiser would include the basement bathroom in my house value because it was trashed and unusable. The toilet flushed, but I would have gone outside before using it as it was NASTY.)

[Jim Becker]

I agree with you Brian. The first few pieces I assembled in what was my office at the old property just didn't look right to me and I figured out what I needed to do to properly close and tighten up the joints. Fortunately, I figured that out sooner rather than later! The stuff was being ornery with me....

[Zachary Hoyt]

I've been wondering if I should practice with a couple of pieces to make sure I am doing it right, or if it would be smarter not to do that as I may mess up the edges if I assemble and disassemble them extra times. I imagine that they should fit tightly together, but is there more to knowing if they fit than that?

[Tom M King]

Just take your time. It's not That hard. If you don't hit the tapper quite hard enough, it won't go together, but it won't hurt anything, and will still go together with enough persuasion. You can damage an edge if you hit it too hard. It shouldn't take you long to get the feel though. They can be put together, and disassembled multiple times with no damage. They come back apart MUCH easier than they go together.

I put almost half of ours down backwards, which is significantly more fiddly than the intended way, but it still wasn't extremely hard.

I had two curved walls to fit, two 45 degree angles to fit to a slate floor, and fit around three sides of a stone chimney. Also, the bathrooms were tiled with a mortar bed on top of the concrete slab, so I had to taper the floor up to those, and also to that slate floor, to do away with any thresholds in doorways. Not only do I dislike thresholds, but we're making it handicap accessible, so I wanted wheels to roll smoothly everywhere. Instructions say not to glue it down, but I asked construction adhesive for some help at those transition slopes. That's why those toolboxes are sitting there on it.

Imagine if I had tried to find someone to do those things to suit me. That's why I don't even bother to get anyone else to do anything. We're out in the sparsely populated country, so I imagine finding subcontractors would be worse than almost anywhere else. That's what I've done for living-just go ahead and do it myself.

For the sides where I could slide the floor under the casing, I cut the casing with a wood spacer, and a Made in England Japanese pull saw. The other side of the wall, the casing was scribed, and hinged down, and finished with colored caulking-good enough for a rental house.

[Zachary Hoyt]

That must have been a very complex job to do all of that, and especially the curved walls. I can relate to the subcontractor situation. My view for the last 20 years has been that I might as well mess a job up myself as pay someone else to mess it up for me. At least I know what I did, and can learn something from my mistakes. I'm hiring someone to install a septic system and to put in a 200 amp panel and service, and am planning to do the rest myself, as best I can.

[Tom M King]

It's not something that I worry about. I've been doing this kind of thing for a living for 47 years now. I just decide how I want something to end up, and then figure out how to do it. It's all the same to me.

I don't have many pictures of that floor job, but did find one more. This is the other side of that chimney, where it intersects the slate in the entry, and the other curved wall. It's perfectly flush with the top of that slate. I just used the prefinished synthetic shoe molding around that curve, after this to finish up.

You can see the Vaughn mallet in the picture. This was shortly before I threw away the tool I told you not to buy.

Since I had come down the hall you saw in another picture, and around the front of that fireplace, all of the flooring in this picture was put down backwards from the normal way. The majority of it was put down normally, but two bedrooms, the curved walls, the laundry room, and the kitchen were all done backwards.

[Tom M King]

I did the cutting to fit that chimney with a couple of coping saws, and a couple of jewelers saws out on the front porch floor, hanging off the steps to keep the mess out of the house. This picture is doing some crown molding there, but this was just a few steps out the front of the room where that chimney is. It cuts very easily. We've owned that point a lot longer than we have this house. It's really a separate piece of property, but this is on an adjoining lot.

[Zachary Hoyt]

That is a very beautiful view you have there. I won't have nearly that much to install backward, so I'm thankful for that, and no curves or stonework so it should be easier.