{31 Days to a Brand New Room}Day 6: Vinyl Plank Flooring

If you're joining us for the first time today, this is day 6 of a 31 day series about how to give a room in your home a brand new look, from top to bottom, completely DIY.  

You'll find links to all the other posts in the series here, if you're interested.

A while back I had the brilliant idea to rip the yucky old pet-stained carpet out of all of our bedrooms and paint the plywood floors.  It was brilliant in that it got the yucky old carpet out of there, but design-wise it was more successful in some rooms than others.  The general effect in Sydney's room was not good.  Somewhat hideous actually.  So even though we are working on a tight budget for this project, new flooring had to be a part of the deal.  

I just happened to come across a random post about vinyl plank flooring on a random blog.{It was one of those bored evenings where you click one link after another until you don't even know where you end up or why you got there -- we all have those right?}   I had never heard tell of vinyl plank flooring before, but it looked really great and was super affordable so I decided to find out more.  I read a hundred reviews of the product and only a couple of them were negative.  All the rest were 5-star rave reviews.  I even went to the store to check it out in person and it seemed pretty awesome.

Don't get me wrong, no one is going to think it is real wood, but it looks as good as most laminates and has the added benefit of being cheaper and easier to install.  The best price and biggest selection I could find was at HomeDepot.com.  We narrowed it down to three options:

I really, really liked the hickory, but we ended up choosing ironwood.  Ultimately, I liked its more refined look and deeper color.  It has a bluish undertone that I thought would look fantastic with the navy blue walls.  Plus it was on sale for $1.59 a square foot the night I sat down to order so that was the clincher.  All said, I spent about $200 which is a small fortune to me right now, but it needed desperately to be done.  {I saved enough by getting the color that was on sale to buy the are rug I wanted so it was a win-win!} 

Installation was super-easy.  There is a really helpful video on the Home Depot website that we followed.  It's a floating floor, like the laminate we have in the main living area of our house.  There is a super-strong adhesive strip on the edge of each vinyl plank that attaches to to the planks in the row before it that holds the whole floor together.  When we got to the end of each row, we just cut the last plank with a utility knife and used the cut end to start the next row.  That way our joints were staggered and we didn't have any waste.  It only took a couple rows for us to get the feel for how to line them up perfectly.  The whole floor went down in about 2 hours.  You can't beat that, right?!  It looks stunning, but that may just be because of the badness of the dark-brown-painted plywood that was in the room previously.  See for yourself:

I really thought twice {or three or four times} about spending so much money on my tight-budget room redo, but I have no regrets.  It feels like a completely different room in here already and it's only Day 6!  Come back tomorrow to see how we are making the closet more functional {and actually kinda' pretty}.