It's always satisfying when a DIY project starts out with a simple goal in mind but ends up improving your daily quality of life in ways you hadn't anticipated. That's what happened with the floor I recently installed in our "sunroom," the little-used front entrance area of our 1939 home.
The room has always had plenty of charm thanks to its large windows bringing sunny views of the neighborhood to our south, and eventually of our detached garage/studio to the west. But it lacked a clear purpose, despite its proximity to the living room, particularly since we as a family enter via the back (kitchen) door, due to the positioning of the garage, and visitors also mostly use the back entrance after parking in front of the garage.
It has functioned over the years as sort of a playroom (when the kids were little), an occasional place to sit in the wood IKEA patio chairs we brought inside and repainted as beach-house-ish "sunroom chairs," and as a storage place for coats, shoes, backpacks, and umbrellas--despite being inconveniently located on the opposite end of the house from where we actually come and go. When we got a cat, it became a place to put the food, water, and litterbox.
I installed the vinyl floor visible below not long after we moved in in late '99. The previous owners had kept this room, with its then-varnished three-quarter inch tongue-and-groove paneling, pretty rustic, with a strictly decorative old iron cookstove on display (which they fortunately took with them) and brown-painted plywood floor. However, the floor was extremely flat and flex-free--I later found out it was 3/4" plywood over 1/2" plywood resting on stringers over the solid concrete slab of what had likely once been an open porch.
After researching various flooring options at the time (and heeding my wife's insistence that no fake woodgrain be involved, ruling out Pergo laminate), I settled on solid Armstrong vinyl flooring squares, the same kind that have been used in schools and churches and retail stores for 60 or 70 years.
With their precision-cut edges, the vinyl went down quite quickly after I applied--with a grooved trowel--the approved Armstrong adhesive.
The color on these things, with their "flecky" texture, goes all the way through, making them popular for high-wear situations. I knew that Armstrong recommended waxing this vinyl, but the floor looked fine and I didn't really want to mess with it.
I should have. While the floor went down flat and straight, I believe that over time moisture migrated into those unsealed cracks and the tiles began loosening, to the point that the floor sometimes seemed like a giant "slider puzzle."
For the most part, the squares were still in good shape, though dull on the surface. But I knew I'd have to re-stick them to the floor, and I didn't want to mess with wax any more than when I put them in.
Thanks to a tip from Family Handyman magazine, and again keeping in mind the "no fake woodgrain--or any woodgrain" request of my wife, I found and ordered some new flooring that we'll get to in a moment. But first I had to remove the old one.
Fortunately, the adhesive had loosened so much that no chipping or pulling was required. My son and I really just grabbed them by the edge and lifted them up.
These tiles are such workhorses that I knew they could have a second life with someone willing to reinstall and wax them. But with all the other options out there, is there still anyone around willing to trade maintenance chores for superb durability? Instead of just throwing them in the trash, I stacked them under the garage porch, took a few photos, wrote up some ad copy (complete with brand name, color name, and full disclosure about the waxing requirement) and posted it on Craigslist. This was one of the photos.
Within a week, I had a buyer, who--per my instructions on Craigslist--loaded them up while we were away and left the requested $30 under a nearby brick. Gotta love the Midwest.
With my floor cleared for installation, and several days of holiday available to work on it, I gathered my supplies and brought the new flooring up from the basement.
It's "Marmoleum Click," a snap-together surface made by the European flooring giant "Forbo." Though they offer plenty of snap-together floating floors by Pergo and other American makers, the big-box home supply merchants don't sell this particular stuff, and it may be because it has none of the fake wood grain that Americans love. You're going to find Marmo Click at specialty flooring retailers--in my case, Inhabit, a downtown purveyor of unique and eco-friendly building products.
Marmoleum is considered "green" because its wear surface (top) is actually old-fashioned linoleum, one of the earliest modern flooring types whose key ingredients are linseed oil, pine rosin, and sawdust. Remarkably durable and easy to care for, it has fallen out of favor as plastic flooring has grown in popularity. But it is making a small comeback among those who explicitly want flooring made from organic ingredients, or who (like us) just prefer its authentic pattern and texture, which--like vinyl--goes all the way through.
Marmoleum's real genius, however, is the way it's mounted on what appears to be some form of MDF (not sure how green that is) and a cork backing, which adds insulation and softens its step a bit. Equally important, it has a uniquely and precisely milled edge-interlocking system that makes getting a smooth and visually seamless surface drop-dead simple--a far cry from the old days when Linoleum came only in big stiff rolls that required professional installation.
Here's the first two tiles (each about 1' x 3'--actually 30cm x 90cm) in place in the southeast corner of the room.
Since this is a "floating floor" (no adhesive holding it down), you have to leave a quarter-inch or so gap all the way around (to be later covered by shoe molding) to allow for expansion and contraction. That's why I cut little pieces of scrapwood to stick around the edge as temporary spacers until the mass of floor gets big enough to not move on its own during installation.
The way the floor snaps together with a well-engineered clicking action is particularly satisfying. The tongue and groove of adjoining sections pulls the pieces together so tightly that you can't feel the seam with your fingers, and the lighting has to be just right to even see the line.
The first row is especially easy, because you're not tongue-and-grooving two edges, as you have to do on later rows--although even that is not difficult. Jus align the first end . . .
And push it down on the leading end. Then you're ready for the next one.
Here's the first three rows, giving a real flavor of the mottled gray color we chose. It almost looks like some sort of stone. But not woodgrain! That would be terrible.
Note that the leading edge of the installation (the row next to the unfinished floor) is just slightly flared up over by the distant base molding. This is normal, and its due to the slight resistance that helps the engineered tongue-and-groove system make the flooring seams so snug. When the next row of flooring gets attached, this one will lay completely flat from its weight.
I swept and vacuumed the plywood before starting, but stuff happens, so I kept a whisk broom handy as I went along to ensure that everything under each new row stayed clean and--the whole point of that--flat.
Also note (above) the temporary wood block propping up the tile just behind my hands. This is necessary because you're mating two adjoining edges with the same tongue (or groove).
It goes together brilliantly. First, you connect the short edge and pivot it down. Because the whole row is at a slight angle, you can still slide the long-edge tongue and groove together easily.
Sometimes, a slight tap is necessary to really snug them up, but your Marmoleum dealer will loan you a small, plastic block that fits over the edge just for this purpose, and avoids damaging the connecting edge you'll need on the next row.
Once the row is done, you pull out the "angle-preserver" wood blocks I mentioned above and push the whole row down. My son and I started at opposite ends and just sort of crawled toward each other until the row was flat, or nearly flat. It takes about ten seconds.
This continued on for several hours, and into the next day as we worked our way across the room and prepared for the irregularly shaped cuts on the north side of the room. One problem with buying this flooring is that you have to buy the planks in seven-plank packs, so I measured several times, particularly around the various ins and outs of the north wall, and it looked like it was going to be really close--I didn't know how close. I didn't want to order another package with its minimum of seven planks.
I'm not going to lie to you--It got ugly as I began to cut planks over on the other side of the room. Sawdust covered everything, tools were scattered everywhere, and my legs began to ache as I went up and down a hundred times--cut, fit, cut, fit.
After getting the floor in place, I had to start on shoe molding to cover the gap around the edge. This required primer and two coats of latex matching the existing room's green trim color, a separate operation done in the basement a few days earlier.
Fortunately, I bought a good pneumatic finish nail gun a few years ago, and it quickly locks the trim into place once I finish fitting and miter-saw cutting each piece in the hopeless A-R fashion I am compelled to follow.
However, it was all worth it once the tools were gone and cleaning commenced. I swept the dust into a big pile, vacuumed everything with the shop vac, and gave it a light damp mop (no soaky-mop water cleaning here--it's not designed for bathrooms). With each stage of cleaning, the floor I'd imagined emerged ever clearer, until . . .
Now, there is one more part to this story. In the northeast corner of this room (just to the left of the front-entrance door visible above) is a little four-foot-wide nook, formed by the inverse shape of the "fireplace bulge" from the living room (left side of image, below, behind the temporary work-light cord). From the time we moved in here, we didn't really know what to do with this little shelf area, so Sheri filled it with a variety of vintage-60s toy collectibles that few people ever saw. I should have gotten a picture when those items were on display, but at least I got this one, after the new flooring had almost reached this point and we suddenly decided to decommission it from its former function.
The little built-in cabinet--also made from this beefy solid-wood paneling--was less useful than you'd think. We used it for overflow toy storage when the kids were younger (our entire "Hot Wheels" collection lived here, as well as some Polly Pockets), and then as a place for litterbox collection bags, once we got a cat and had the litterbox in the nook to the left, just below the vent visible above. But it was a dead node, overall, unclaimed space that contributed little to our everyday life.
While working on the floor, and having husband-wife discussions about the purpose of this room, an idea emerged from the fact that I had mentioned putting a small desk in this room for mail sorting and laptop-based web surfing--something I'd been doing for years at the dining room table. Sheri said: Why not turn this shelf/cabinet space into a little desk area? It was a good idea, but one I had never considered since I thought she considered her collectibles too precious to ever remove--but it turns out she was ready to close the museum down. I asked if she minded getting rid of the built-in cabinet (she is an even a greater champion of the Old and Authentic than I am), to allow for leg room. She did not.
So, faced my wrecking bar and hammer, the surprisingly stout cabinet was pried apart and turned into firewood. After doing touch-up painting where it had been, I continued laying flooring all the way under the former cabinet spot, further stretching my just-barely-enough flooring plank stock. But the emerging desk-y possibilities presented by this spot made it all the more appealing, and I pushed forward until this was the result:
During the next few days, I tried it out as a surfing station. Success! It worked great, even with the lousy "balance chair" (half-sit, half-kneel) from the basement office. But this was just the first step.
During January and February, I made a few additional enhancements . . .
- salvaging a piece of cabinet-grade plywood from the basement, painting it gray, and sealing it with wonderful Polycrylic from Minwax to provide a larger (and non-stick) desk surface on top of the existing narrow ledge.
- adding a task light. I bought this low-voltage, high-intensity halogen spotlight years ago at IKEA, and it was sitting in the "lamp bank" in the basement awaiting its next purpose.
- getting a new chair
. . . it was finally taking shape as a comfortable place to surf in the evening, sort the mail, and charge electronics.
In fact, charging electronics--the camera batteries, the phone, the laptops--is one of its most important tasks, greatly reducing the wires and gadgets formerly found on the shelving unit in the dining room.
To help tame a potential cable tangle in this new location, I picked up an odd but useful wood box at the thrift store and cut it in half to make two under-desk cable/charger holders. They're now screwed to the underside of the desk where they hold a power strip (behind the sliding cover on the right) and the charger for my work laptop (on the left), out of sight. An inconspicuous hole in the corner of the desk now routes wires safely to and from the work surface above.
I'd been looking at chairs and knew that the big box and office-supply store ones are made-in-China cruddy. While sofa shopping at Crate & Barrel, I stumbled across this one, whose sharp styling and ergonomic quality immediately grabbed my attention. It's a Steelcase Cobi, a "contract" (office) quality chair that sits great and was worth every penny of its greatly reduced floor-model pricing at C&B. And I could have it in any color I wanted, as long as it was black!
I'm writing this from that chair, in this formerly unused corner of the house, and it's obvious now that reclaiming this space has had ripple effects, including clearing off the dining table for actual eating, making the dining room cabinet less cluttered with electronics, and providing a good spot for mail and magazines to get sorted out without going to my "main" office in the basement.
Oh, and though he was traumatized for several days by the sound of saws and nailguns, Kitty approves of the new space, too. He's adapted to his new fully enclosed litterbox in the basement and has a new and tidy corner of the sunroom to eat and drink in (just to the right of this picture).
One more interesting point about Marmoleum--It's available not only in the 1 x 3-foot planks I used, but in 1 x 1 squares that can be mixed and matched to create original designs like this:
