Flooring

 

Flooring is done

The job of actually installing the flooring was easy. Getting prepared to do it took a long time.

I used a vinyl composite tile (VCT) from Armstrong. VCT is not "peel and stick" tile, rather you towel on some special VCT adhesive, let it dry to a tacky surface, lay down the tile, and use a heavy roller to make sure it seats into the adhesive. Where you need less than a full tile or a cut out you use a utility knife to score the tile and then it'll break along the score. It's all easy. Most of the time was spent letting the adhesive dry to a tacky surface.

Watching glue dry

They make a lot, and I mean a lot, of different colors. There are only a few "patterns" though. Home Depot and Lowes only stock a few different tiles (black, white, grey, and tan). I decided to special order a color I thought would complement the wall panels I'll be installing. That ended up being a fail. 

UPS declared the first shipment "lost" after a few weeks. And the second shipment was damaged and unusable so I returned it. Like most tile, VCT is sort of fragile when it's not installed. They ship in ~40 lb boxes and so they are prone to damage when shipped as individual boxes (they normally ship on a large pallet of 20+ boxes). The normal lifting and setting down of the 40 lb box ends up dinging the corners, so many/most of the tiles have broken corners.

I decided to compromise and use the "tan" Armstrong tile Home Depot stocks. Turns out Becky said she likes that better than what I special ordered anyhow. Wish I'd listened to her 5 weeks ago...

Here's a rundown of the other flooring I considered:

Marmoleum Click Cinch tiles: these are a "floating" tile product that I really liked. I thought a floating tile product would be good for trailer flooring because the underlayment can shift. However, I was concerned about narrow runs (like down the center of the trailer) not having enough "edge" to stay together properly. Some folks online concurred that this was a problem.

Marmoleum sheet or tile: when I decided against the Click Cinch tiles, this is what I wanted. Marmoleum is traditional for these vintage trailers and I think they look better than the VCT. However with the small amount I needed it just wasn't going to economical. The tile is relatively expensive but the minimum shipping fee was going to cost more than the tile.

Peel & stick vinyl: everyone online said to avoid it. The glue doesn't hold up under the wide temperature swings a trailer sees, and the tiles sometimes shrink a bit over time in higher temps.

Sheet vinyl: I wanted to do the install myself and so this wasn't a good option. Maybe if I was doing a body-off flooring install (like they do on Airstreams) I might try it. But I thought that small space was going to be a problem for installing sheet vinyl.

I've got a bunch of extruded polystyrene foam board insulation and wall paneling sitting in my garage (the paneling arrived today about 6 weeks after I ordered it). So I'll be busy installing that for the next several weekends.

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