Over the past several years, I’ve redone almost all of the flooring in the house. Since it was built in the late 90’s, most of the original flooring was carpet. I’ve gradually been switching to various solid surfaces (wood on the top two floors, vinyl plank in the basement, and tile in the bathrooms). The only rooms in the house that still had originally flooring were the guest bedroom, both offices, the master closet, and my wife’s makeup room, which is in the smaller second closet in the master suite. This past month, I decided to upgrade the master closet to vinyl plank flooring, and also to do some other remodeling work at the same time. In the past, I’ve often used professional installers to install flooring since it’s relatively cheap and precision is important since people will be walking on it frequently. In this case though, I decided to do the work myself since it would allow me to do the project in stages, which was necessary since the wardrobes on either side of the closet couldn’t easily be removed from the room. I found a vinyl plank product at Menards that I really liked, and was relatively inexpensive:
I did my side of the closet first, moving the wardrobes out of the way, then removing the carpet underneath them. Once the carpet was removed, I laid down an underlayment layer, and then started installing the flooring. It took me a couple of tries to get it perfect at the beginning, since it’s extremely important the the first few rows of planks be perfectly square (otherwise the entire floor will be off and have issues with planks fully clicking together). Once I got past that, the installation process went pretty smoothly.
Along with the flooring, I also painted the walls and added new trim. Once the first part of the closet was done, I moved the wardrobes back and did the center of the room.
Lastly, I move the other set of wardrobes into the middle of the closet, and did the final side. When the wardrobes were in the middle of the closet, I took the opportunity to repair some damage to the backs of them that had been caused by my wife overloading them with clothes, and to reinforce the backs with construction adhesive and additional staples.
I still need to replace the old dressers at the far end of the closet and to add a runner rug in the middle, but the overall transformation turned out extremely well; I’m very happy with the result of just a few weekends’ worth of work!
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