Installing Your Own Luxury Vinyl Plank Flooring, Part Two

Carpet and dogs are a bad combination. In the two years of living in our home, I dragged out the carpet shampooer more times than I care to disclose. To hang on to our sanity, we replaced the bedroom carpets with dog-friendly luxury vinyl plank (LVP).

If you missed the first part of this story containing a list of materials and some lessons learned, be sure to click here to read.

I recommend you follow your manufacturer's instructions if you decide to try this yourself. I am greatly simplifying the process in this blog post.

In preparation for this project, the hubs and I must've watched at least two hundred hours of YouTube videos. Maybe a slight exaggeration, but we watched a lot of them and every installer had different methods and tips. When it came time to jump in and do it, my DIY experienced in-laws dropped in for Day One to lend a hand on the first room.

We repaid them with a steak dinner, and we probably owe them steak dinners for life. Their help was invaluable.

Here's the before shot of our master bedroom. We measured all rooms multiple times and gave those measurements to the Cali Bamboo salesman who recommended adding 10% extra to allow for mistakes. This LVP product is the Aged Hickory PRO Wide+ Click Vinyl Plank Flooring. I love the quality and color and have no regrets.

Ripping out the carpet and padding was highly satisfying. You know how it feels to pop bubble wrap? Same feeling. That was one of my favorite parts of the day and I can see that I'd love demo day if we ever tear down walls.

If you have a concrete slab, then you will need a moisture barrier between it and the flooring. We purchased our thick underlayment from Cali Bamboo, but I know that some people simply use plastic underlayment by the roll from a store like Home Depot. We overlapped edges on this layer and also sealed seams with metallized tape.

Next, we planned the layout for our planks. We staggered the ending spots of each plank. We also avoided repeating the artificial patterns since this isn't real wood, and we didn't want consecutive identical planks. We made sure to leave some expansion gaps around the perimeter for this floating floor. Those are the yellow plastic pieces you see in the photo. Floors can swell with temperature changes, and it may buckle if there is no room for expansion. We hid those expansion spaces with quarter round trim at the end of the job.

The planks have an interlocking edge that snaps together with a tapping block and rubber hammer. In a way, it felt like putting a gigantic floor puzzle together. Which reminds me...this is a killer on your back.

The most difficult part of this job was cutting angles since our room didn't have 90 degree angles. Out of three bedrooms, only one contains all 90 degree corners. It was also tough to cut out door jambs at the bottom so the plank can sit underneath the trim.

You will need a few tools. Your flooring instructions say you can do this with only hand tools. But I think that purchasing the Dremel Ultra Saw was the smartest thing we did. It was inexpensive and will be used for many other projects. See the tool list for this project from the Part One post (click here to read).

We watched some DIY videos that showed LVP boards being scored with a box cutter and then snapped along the straight line. Our planks were really too thick for that to work. Maybe it was because we chose a step above the builder's grade plank that it seemed to thick for box cutter scoring. We used a power saw instead.

Tip: Choose a room or garage and turn it into your cutting area. I had a dog grooming table that I turned into my work bench. While you're at it, be smart and choose the closest area without steps. You'll thank me later.

This master bedroom (the room we learned on) took a long day to complete. At the end of the day, we still had to install thresholds to the closet and master bath as well as the quarter round to hide that expansion gap. If I were doing my entire house in this flooring, I'd consider running these planks from room to room without thresholds transition strips.

We got faster and smarter as we finished each room. Do your research and good luck on your own flooring projects!

Time: 2 days per room

Cost: Approx. $1000 per bedroom

Difficulty: Average+

I'll leave you with a couple of YouTube videos from a guy who installed the same flooring in his home.