Innovation in Luxury Vinyl Flooring - the Easiest Way to Install a Floor!

Our luxury vinyl flooring install was a long time coming. You might even say long overdue. Our basement flooded and we lost our beautiful engineered hardwood floor. Collateral damage was my craft studio, Hubs’ man cave and our laundry room. Despite doing all the right things, and even recovering from a previous flood, we knew we were taking a risk by installing real wood. After the incident, our dimpled membrane did not save us a second time.

It’s gut wrenching for anyone who encourages sustainability to send all that material to landfill! Not to mention hard on the pocket-book. Now with the flooring out, we’re down to bare concrete again. Pretty ugly, right? Well not for long.

True North Luxury Vinyl Loose Lay Planks

True North LV Max Tab

Swiffer sweeper and refills

Plywood (if building jig)

12" speed square

Utility knife and extra blades

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We did what any DIY’er would do and got to work researching the market extensively! This time around, we weren't taking any chances and our research paid off. We found a loose lay flooring that's rated for commercial use with the best wear layer in the industry (30 ml). You might think that kind of quality comes with a big price tag – but that isn’t the case in this instance. It cost us less than half of the engineered wood install and still less than comparable luxury vinyl planks of the same quality.

The secret sauce, or rather the innovation, is not the flooring itself. It's the peel 'n stick tab system that you can get with it. With no click system or even glue to fuss with, anyone can install this flooring - whether you have DIY experience or not!

We considered a luxury vinyl click system before settling on the loose lay planks. However, with the history of water problems in our basement (and, let's face it - most basements will experience water damage at some point), a loose lay product turns out to be superior. That’s because if we ever damage a piece, we can simply insert a utility knife between the planks and cut the tabs. If you’ve ever tried to replace just one piece of flooring, you know it isn’t easy. With True North LVMax tabs, it is!

If only one plank is damaged, cut the tabs and use a plunger to lift it from the surrounding flooring. In case of another flood, after cutting the tabs keeping it in place, we can simply lift the vinyl plank, clean it up and put it right back down.

Even if our washing machine leaks, you can easily lift an entire floor, dry it out and re-install by setting it back in place with new tabs in a day. You can’t easily make repairs, or disassemble a floor without possible breakage, with any other flooring on the market that I'm aware of!

You can't beat it for ease of installation. If you can peel a bandaid, you can install it! It’s also waterproof and goes down fast (the planks are 9″ x 48″). But the best thing about it for a DIYer is that don’t need glue, or even fancy tools to install it.

Sustainability of Luxury Vinyl Flooring

As DIYers that tout upcycling and sustainability as a lifestyle, you might not be thinking that Luxury Vinyl Floor is a sustainable choice for us. However, when you consider that our previous wood flooring is now in landfill, LVT makes the best sense. It’s reusable and there’s nothing organic to mould. I can’t help but emphasize again that after any kind of water issue, you can just lift it, dry it and put it back with new tabs.

With luxury loose lay vinyl, you’ll also have the least amount of waste. Because there is no click system along one side of the plank, loose lay can be positioned on the floor at either end of the plank leaving practically nothing as waste. Although we ordered an additional 5% to account for waste, we literally have none in a 700 sq. ft. basement; just the handful of scraps you see in the second picture. I’m sure I’ll even think of a way to upcycle those as a Craft Rehab project!

What is True North LVMax?

True North LVMax Tab is a peel and stick tab system that connects loose lay vinyl planks so you don’t need glue around the perimeter of the room to keep the floor from shifting. The best part for us is that the product is eco-friendly. There’s absolutely no odour, and more importantly, no volatile organic compounds (VOCs). That means no migraines for me on this install! The tabs come in a roll with pre-perforated tabs (second pic).

You need to calculate 4 tabs per plank. The third picture shows our per square foot flooring calculation; we needed 4 rolls of tabs for our flooring install.

Remember I said it’s as easy as peeling a bandaid? You just place the plank on the floor, add three tabs along the length, peel off the backing, then butt the next plank beside it. When each row is complete, lift the ends and tab them too. Roll the seams and you’re done! And without even breaking a sweat! You can walk on the floor right away. Be sure to watch the video at the top of this I'ble to see my ‘butt ‘n roll’ method of laying the planks.

To speed things up even more, I pre-tear the tabs into individual sheets first and pop them into a box so we can just grab and go (last pic).

My husband filled the find cracks we had in our floor before laying the loose lay planks (as you see on the video). That's an optional step. What isn't optional is making sure that the floor is as dust free as can be. With drywall dust and dust from the crack filler, a vacuum will not get it all. So we went over it with a Swiffer to pick up all the dust we could!

When you lay out each room, you want to ensure that you have no less than 4.5" width of flooring material against the walls if your plank width is 9" (the baseboard will cover the expansion gap you leave to start). This requires some calculating, so have your room layout with measurements handy (like the one we showed in the previous step). Our starter strip turned out to be about 5 1//2" wide.

To cut the planks along the length for the first row, we used a long aluminum rectangular tube as our straight edge. Score on your mark, then bend along the score. Your plank will snap along the score. If the cut didn't quite go through to the backing, use your blade to finish the cut through the backing to separate it. A word of warning: don't make any cuts on top of finished flooring! It's too easy to nick your finished floor.

To cut each plank to length at the beginning and end of each row, my husband created the custom jig you see above. He screwed down a piece of metal bar onto a plywood backing. The metal bar is set exactly to the width of the board (in our case 9"). You just measure and mark where you want to cut the length. Then place the plank on the jig. Line up the square on your mark and score the plank. Just as we did with the longer cuts, snap the vinyl along the score.

When you get to a place you have to cut around, like the doorway in the second last picture, measure and mark carefully. In instances like this, we use a jigsaw to cut out the shape. To keep vinyl dust from taking to the air, we make our jig saw cuts in the garage.

Once you're further along with your flooring install, you can put cardboard (the packaging from the flooring) over your just-laid planks to protect it. But remember, use a scrap piece of wood - or build yourself a jig like my husband did - to cut on.

In the previous step, cutting around the doorway was pretty straightforward. But what if you have something more challenging, like round pipes?

We have two tricks for cutting around those!

The first is to use a gadget with pins that can take the shape of the pipe. In our case, the toilet pipe fell in between two planks, so we cut a half circle along where the boards meet at the edge. As you see in the second picture, we're still using a utility knife to make the cuts. Leave at least a 1/8" expansion gap.

In the second instance, we're using the very paper that came in between the planks to make a template for a floor drain in the laundry room. Just line up the plank with the paper, and measure/position for the round cut-out and transfer the measurments. You can then cut the hole into the paper and fit it onto the pipe before you make any cuts to ensure a proper fit. In this case, we used a jig saw to cut in the middle of the plank (as shown on the video).

When you're starting a new row, take the time to measure the cut on the first plank so that your boards end up staggered as shown in the first two pics.

When the planks butt up end to end, sometimes it's difficult to see that stagger, so we pop on a piece of green tape at the joint as a visual reference (3rd pic). Of course, you don't have to do that, but with our aging eyes, we find that helpful :).

Leave at least a 6" - 10" stagger between the ends of each board.

It's impossible to cut a sliver off a plank with a utility blade and snap it off with your hands because there is no leverage. I had an epiphany to use one of my stained glass tools, called a grozing plier, to assist with that task. It worked perfectly (you'll see that in action on the video)!

If you think installing flooring is too challenging for a beginner, think again. Loose lay plank is not only the easiest luxury vinyl flooring to install, but the easiest floor to install – period.

I have chronic back pain and even I can demonstrate it for you! I’m taking a short-cut by installing the tabs for each plank right on a table top. However, for those of you that are more able, you’ll easily apply the tabs when the vinyl plank is on the floor. Just apply three tabs to one long side (one every twelve inches).

It can help to have a measuring gauge when you're installing the tabs; just mark a full length cut off from a plank with green tape every 12" as a guide.

The end of each plank gets a tab after each row is laid. That’s because you want to butt against an edge without adhesive so you can position the plank and get a tight seam before making contact with the rest of the tabs. You’ll see what I mean in the video.

After the adhesive tabs are on, roll the seam with a hand roller to ensure the adhesive makes contact with both sides of the back of the vinyl plank. Or if you’ve put on weight during lock down, like me, just ‘walk the planks’. Kidding of course :). Use the roller!

I’ve installed just about every kind of flooring there is; solid wood, engineered wood, porcelain tile etc. As you see in the video at the beginning of this I'ble, nothing goes down as quickly as these loose lay planks go down! You’ll be able to install an entire basement in just one weekend. That sure didn’t happen when we installed our engineered hardwood!

Above is a final look at the before and after of the luxury vinyl installation in my craft studio. After being without a craft studio for what seems like an eternity, it's great to get my VW desk off those dollies! I don't think the space has ever looked better and I’m happy to show you how great our finished vinyl flooring looks in my office!

For anyone interested (this isn't a sponsored post), the colour of luxury vinyl flooring we’re using from True North Luxury Vinyl is Aged Stirling Oak and I think it really brightens up my workspace. With the year we’ve had, it’s wonderful to have a cheerful space to work in again :).

You'll find more info on this flooring install on this loose lay vinyl plank flooring installation post.

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