Why I Love Tarkett Luxury Vinyl Plank Flooring
If you are considering laying luxury vinyl plank flooring in your home, my husband and I have become quite good at it after installing it in my studioffice, powder room and guest bathroom. We have a few tips to share that will make the process easier for you.
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Happy is what I am feeling with how easy this luxury vinyl plank flooring called ProGen by Tarkett was to install. I love the clean fresh look of the room now.
I am sharing lots of photos below along with a few floor installation tips and tricks that we found helped make the installation a breeze.
BEFORE: Game Room With Wall to Wall Carpet
Here is how the room looked BEFORE with the old wall-to-wall carpet, exposed electrical wiring on the ceiling, yellowed walls and the brown door, window trim and ceiling fans.
AFTER: Game Room with Tarkett ProGen Vinyl Planks
We use this room as a place to workout and when we have friends and family over, to play pool and/or ping-pong.
The flooring we installed is luxury vinyl plank from Tarkett. It is call ProGen and comes in 22 different colors. We used the color Milled Oak Copper 25L2. Doesn’t it look exactly like wood? But it’s not, it is vinyl that is waterproof and pretty much damage proof.
Tarkett ProGen flooring makes the room look open and airy, so much so that I decided I preferred the spacious feel of the room when we had the furniture all pushed to one side during the floor installation. In the end, I decided to remove the large bookcase along the long wall that had become a magnet for clutter.
I made the wheeled storage basket to hold workout items.
How to Install Tarkett ProGen Luxury Vinyl Plank Flooring
Room Makeover TIP: If you are going to paint the walls in the room, paint them first and use the carpeting as your drop cloth. Since you will be removing it, this step will save you time from having to protect the new flooring from paint.
The hardest part of installing new flooring is ripping up the old carpet and removing all the carpet tacking strips and tacks. Then of course, you have to get rid of all of it.
Once that is done, laying the ProGen luxury vinyl plank flooring is easy and goes very fast thanks to the rigid core and uni-click locking system of the planks.
One interesting thing we discovered when we removed the carpet were the names written in the subfloor of the four men that built our house back in 1974. We live off a main road called, Amick’s Ferry Road.
With a little research we found out that the Amick family were one of the first families to settle in the area way back when. A fun discovery.
There are many selling features of Tarkett ProGen flooring, but the one that I like is that it doesn’t warp or bend when exposed to temperature fluctuations or sunlight. This makes it perfect for the room that gets a lot of sun in the afternoon or any room, especially high traffic areas like hallways and mudrooms.
Luxury vinyl plank flooring can be installed with a standard tool set and easily cut with a basic utility knife! No power saw needed. You simply score the plank with the knife, bend and run the knife through the bend to snap it off.
It requires no acclimation time (most other flooring require 24 hours of acclimation time), and can be installed the same day you receive it.
I didn’t paint the inside of the closets, but we did run the ProGen flooring into all three. Ed used a rotary cutting tool to cut a gap where the molding met the floor. That allowed for some slight imperfections in cutting the flooring around the door trim.
I painted the brown louvered doors, white. I love the contrast of the white against the dark floor.
For now, I placed the existing seating back around the pool table, but I am looking for a few metal and wood stools to use instead.
We still have the pool table on sliding discs until we have a chance to level the table. Then I will remove them.
How to Install New Flooring When You Can’t Move The Furniture Out of the Room
Even though they are sold for sliding furniture over carpeting, any of these Furniture Sliding Discs work equally as well over sub-flooring and vinyl plank flooring.
The sliding discs made it possible to leave the pool table and the other large pieces of furniture in the room as we installed the ProGen. We used them to slide all the big items to one side of the room…
…so that we could install the flooring on the empty side. Once that side was done, we slid the furniture over the new flooring and completed the installation on the opposite side of the room.
This pool table was left in the house by the previous owners. It is not a high end table, so I am not afraid to alter the color. I am thinking I may paint the light wood on the table a darker color so it coordinates better with the flooring.
I may create a photo gallery wall on this wall where we previously had bookcases. I have quite a few photos from our previous house that are still packed away in a box. I think I can finally use them here to add color and interest.
More Tips on How to Install Luxury Vinyl Plank Flooring
Installing ProGen Luxury Vinyl Plank flooring is not hard, even for a first time homeowner or DIY’er. Having a few basic tools ready and watching the short installation video made the install easy for us.
The video includes installation of a layer of ProSheet down before the flooring. We did not use this as the flooring can be installed directly over most surfaces.
supplies needed:
- t-square or carpenter’s square
- tape measure
- utility knife with lots of replacement blades
- chalk marker
- rotary style drill with diamond or wood cutting discs or an undercutting blade
- pliers – to remove remaining carpet tacks
- hammer – to remove any popped nails and carpet tacking strips
TIP #1: Buy knee pads or a thick kneeling pad to kneel on. It is a life saver for your knees.
TIP #2: Each plank slides into the last one installed. Simply slide the new plank in along the previous plank, gently push in, then bring down and you will hear a click that locks it into place.
TIP #3: We didn’t have an undercutting blade, but we found a filing drill bit worked well to cut the trim around the doors in the room so the planks would slide right under.
TIP #4: Take your time to figure out detailed cuts around doors. We marked the planks using a chalk marker and straight edge where we would need to cut.
We used a rotary drill with a diamond cutting disc and a utility knife to cut the plank to fit. You can also use an undercutting tool to create a gap between the door trim and floor which hides any imperfection in the cuts.
UPDATE: When installing luxury vinyl plank in a room, buying this inexpensive gauge makes detailed cuts fast, easy and professional. We didn’t have one, but I highly suggest getting one, they are not expensive and will save you time and frustration.
We kept marking and cutting a little bit at a time until we could slide the plank around the door jam for a perfect fit.
TIP #5: Leave 1/4″ expansion space around the perimeter of the floor and columns and other vertical objects in the room for the floor to expand.
It will be hidden once you add shoe molding to the baseboard. Do not nail it to the floor.
TIP #6: For flooring transitions where the ProGen meets another type of flooring, use a wood threshold that you can buy at a home improvement store and stain it to match the ProGen. We used a wood one that is made specifically for the transition from carpet to vinyl. It is screwed into the subfloor.
TIP #7: Get ready for the desire to want to extend your new ProGen flooring out into hallways and other rooms in your home. :-)
I couldn’t be happier with how the room came out :-)