My dressing room got a little makeover on Friday and I am loving how it turned out. After we moved in I ripped out the carpet and was left with just the subfloor so the quickest, easiest, and cheapest thing to do was paint it.
The white helped to open things up and it was okay for the time being. Since I only used wall paint in a flat finish, however, it scratched very easily, got stained when I sat down in dark jeans, and started to peel in a certain areas as well. If I were really serious about painting it for the long haul I would have used exterior paint in an eggshell or semi-gloss finish followed by some sort of polyurethane or clear coat to seal things up real nice. But since I knew I wanted to do something a little more permanent later on, the simple white paint did the job up until this past weekend.
I'm not sure where this idea came from really but since I work across the street from a Lowe's I just thought one day to go over and take a look at their vinyl wood flooring. Since the dressing room is still possibly a temporary space and our dream is to make it a bathroom, I didn't want to do anything too permanent, but still nicer than a painted subfloor. That's when the idea of vinyl seemed like the way to go. We used vinyl tiles in the kitchen of old old apartment and it was easy to install, hard to mess up, and looked great two years later.
So when I popped over to Lowe's last Wednesday I was pleasantly surprised at not only the selection, but at the quality and price! Vinyl wood flooring has come a long way and at 88¢ a square foot I was sold. Now the question was, what color?
I decided to go with the lighter option (Natural Oak) because it would work better with our light bedroom carpet and since the room is teeny tiny I figured the lighter the better.
I did run into a couple problems but luckily they were quickly remedied. The first is the abrupt stop of the subfloor in our storage space, a tight 2.5' across but generous 8' deep area. The "door" leads to yet even more storage that runs the whole length of our upstairs and even has its own light source. Truthfully I don't think we'll ever need the space but it's nice to know it's there if we ever did need it.
A bunch of sections cut from our leftover wood floor scraps did just the trick to fill in the space and make it a nice level surface for the planks.
The second issue was a large chunk of the subfloor missing most likely from when they ran the wire that I'm guessing goes to our room for tv/phone hookup. Now I'd love to get rid of it completely but for the future owner's sake (whenever that may be) it will stay and we will just do the best we can to hid it with the baseboards.
And for now, I leave you with a little sneak peak...
