Why of Cork!

I know, its a lame title but I couldn't resist, the dork in me had to come out. As I discussed in my master plan, we purchased Cork Flooring from Lumber Liquidators to put down in our laundry room. My first post about our laundry room had a glimpse of what the previous linoleum looked like but I'll give you a better idea in just a few. This project was actually pretty simple (thanks to all of the help from my dad) and its made the room look really incredible!

So here is our former flooring in all of its glory. It wasn't that it was bad or looked terrible, we just wanted a higher quality floor for resale value.

Luckily we were able to leave it & just start adding everything else to the top since we picked out a floating floor (yet another reason we chose cork over tile). First we pulled all of the flooring out of the boxes & laid it around the den to "acclimate to our environment" for about 48 hours.

Next we laid down a moisture barrier, I'm still not sure that we really needed it but figured it was better to be safe than sorry!

We actually determined later that we started on the wrong end of the room but we made it work anyways. Lets just say that our lives would've been much easier had we been able to slide a full piece under the door jam rather than piecing it together. :)

We really only had 2 obstacles to our rectangle, the air vent & the dryer vent on opposite corners of the room. First up was the air vent, my dad used a combo of a drill & a jigsaw to make that cut. It was really close to the edge of the board so we accidentally broke one before getting the hang of everything. After getting it cut out it was a matter of quick measurements & cuts and banging the boards together until we got to the dryer vent in the other corner of the room. Then it was a guesstimation of a cut & trial & error until it fit. We thought we could just buy a PVC collar to cover it but apparently they don't make those. Oh well, it will be hidden anyways!

Our 32 square foot room took about two hours to do from start to finish. Here it is in all of its glory (without the quarter round to cover the edges).

Finally it was just a matter of trimming off the edges of the underlayment & placing the quarter-round back in, sealing up the edges & touching up the paint on the baseboards (Sherwin Williams Dover White in glossy) & the walls (Sherwin Williams Dapper Tan in flat - btw its not that funky yellow color you see below, the more accurate color is in the photos above)!