Luxury Vinyl Plank flooring in the Basement Laundry Room

Ta Da!

I've been very slowly working on the basement laundry room.  So far all I have done is paint the walls and ceiling.  That took me a couple of months to do so it should be no surprise that putting in the flooring I have chosen is taking forever as well.  I bought this Shaw Luxury Vinyl Plank Flooring from Lowes.  I chose floating vinyl planks because our laundry room has had water issues in the past.  Hopefully putting in new gutters and rodding out our main line has solved that problem for good, but just in case I decided to go with flooring that can get wet without becoming damaged.  Glue and stick vinyl would have been cheaper, but the glue is a no-go with damp conditions, so the click and lock floating floor was definitely the way to go.  Before installing I needed to fix a few holes and ridges in the concrete floor.  There were also a few spots where lumps of copper were sticking out of the floor.  I have no idea what they are from, but my helpful neighbor Ken had a grinder that cut the copper out in just a couple of seconds.  I had serious grinder envy, so I ended up buying an angle grinder of my very own to take care of the areas where the concrete came up in ridges.  After grinding down several parts of the floor I used some ready made concrete to fill in the areas that were too low and uneven.

  The finished product is ridiculously far from perfect, but hopefully it has evened the floor out enough that the imperfections won't show through the vinyl.

Once the floor was prepared I started laying down my flooring.

 

I used my miter saw to make the cuts:

I ended up connecting an entire row end to end first and then clicking that row into the previous one.  I was never able to get the hang of how you could click one plank in at a time, but this worked out just as well.  When I got to my sump pump cover I had to just eyeball it and use a sharpie to mark where my cut should be.

I then used my sawzall to make the cut.  It wasn't precise, but I plan on using some caulk to fill in around the cover so that you can't see the bad cutting job.

After finishing my floor looks like this:

I would have preferred something that didn't mimic the look of a natural product as I think that always ends up looking fake, but awesome flooring like THIS doesn't sell in the US!  I'd rather have a fun pattern but I had to work with what was available to me.  And for just under $2 a square foot, I'm pretty pleased with how it turned out.