Demo is always a load of fun…until you lose your only toilet in the house. In order to get the toilet back in, we have to put our bathroom flooring down first.
Salvaged vs. New
In our previous four flips, we never had to pick out bathroom flooring. With every house we have uncovered beautiful original wood flooring to restore. Well, that is just not the case here. Because we wanted the bathrooms to be bigger, we moved the hallway over about 15 inches. This left us with mismatched floors and pieces missing where the old wall used to be. The flooring in this house has me stumped because everywhere I look there is something different!
So….. I find myself in new territory. I need to pick a bathroom flooring. Something that will go with the master bedroom carpet (that we have not picked yet) as well as the hallway flooring (which we also need to pick yet). I want the bathrooms to be the same so that there are not so many different floors when we finish.
Related: Other Bathroom Renovations
Where to start….
Because of all the different flooring and pieces missing etc. we decided to lay 1/2 inch plywood for a nice flat surface. Best part about laying all of the plywood? The kids used pencil, pen, and marker to write their names and decorate the floor. Should anyone remove our bathroom flooring they will see all of the awesome drawings from the kiddos!
The flooring that we picked from our big box hardware store is a super durable, water resistant, and a narrow seamed 30 year product. It is a dark, rich brown with flecks of gray and black in it. I think it should match whatever flooring we pick for the hall as well as the master bedroom carpet.
I made it my mission to get this bathroom flooring down. Do you know how difficult it is to work at a house with 6 kids and not have a toilet or any fixtures!!?? Luckily, the back of our property butts up to school soccer fields which have bathrooms in a building that we could walk to. How often do you think it happens that we JUST get to the house to work and someone has to go potty. All. …the… time! For the Love!
How to Lay Bathroom Flooring
The trick to anything is to PLAN. Doing anything in haste will only lead to sloppy work or even rework.
What NOT to do:
- Have all full boards on one end and pieces on the other
- All of the rows the same that the seams line up across the whole room
- Leave different sized seams/gaps
- Lay it on uneven subfloor
What TO do:
- Measure to find center of the room
- Plan for even cuts on each end
- Stagger the boards by half the length alternating rows
- Cut the length of your board to end as close to the wall as possible
- Invest in some knee pads!
The flooring is IN! What do you think??
Time to bring in the ‘potty’! WOOT!