A 10 month update about the durability of vinyl tile – how it wears, how to clean it, and how to install it to get a patterned tile floor in an afternoon.
Last summer, we came up with a quick temporary (and trendy) solution for our grubby gross vinyl sheet flooring, and it is, by far, one of the questions I’m asked the most regarding how it’s holding up.
Robert and I play the guinea pig role a lot around here with our projects, and sometimes we do wonder if we’ll see all of our hard work undo itself right before our eyes over the course of a year. We worried the same thing about our concrete countertops in our last kitchen and painted tub/shower/sink in our upstairs bathroom.
But it’s been SO worth the risk because just like those other two quickie/cheap solution DIYs, our vinyl patterned tile has proved to be super durable!
(Some affiliate links are provided in this post.)
If you weren’t around during this laundry room refresh, it originally looked like this:
It was one of those let’s-just-fix-it-with-paint-until-we-can-gut-it kind of jobs. (Just like we’re doing with our kitchen right now.)
We have HUGE plans for gutting a few rooms over the course of the next few years that will likely not be cheap.
If you find yourself with “big home improvement plans” too, that doesn’t mean you have to live with spaces that don’t make you happy until then. A few years is a long time to walk into a room and feel immediately stressed and bummed out every day.
So here is our vinyl tile 10 months after installing it, and we have NOT been easy on it at all.
It takes a beating every day and has seen mud and dirt and leaves and damp pool towels and puddles of water from a plumbing incident and just about anything life can throw at it.
Several times, we’ve had to scoot the heavy washer and dryer across the floor as they have both broken on us at some point. And we had electricians move them to access our fuse box for electrical updates recently. The evidence is this scuffed spot in front of our washing machine.
But, thankfully, we held onto our vinyl tile leftovers after we finished installation last summer, so all we have to do is peel up those 4-5 scuffed tiles and lay down new ones. It makes me so glad that we chose tiles over full sheet vinyl.
(You can see our full vinyl tile installation tutorial here and 18 of my favorite peel and stick vinyl tiles here, if you want to see all of the pretty patterns out there.)
And as far as maintenance, I sweep it whenever needed and use Method Squirt & Mop when it needs a scrub. Not a single tile has peeled up or acts like it’s going to budge anytime soon.
We can still see our old sheet vinyl slightly peeking through the “grout line” cracks since this room is not square at all and we ran into issues perfectly lining them up, but it’s one of those things we barely notice unless we’re looking for flaws.
Seeing how well it’s held up has made me really tempted to try it out in a bathroom or kitchen, but since we have tile and not vinyl in those other spaces right now, I’m okay with just waiting and freshening the grout there temporarily instead. If we had vinyl in those rooms though, I would definitely be using this solution again.
It is more pricey than painting a vinyl floor, but it’s so much faster and there are no fumes or curing times to worry about. And if this patterned Moroccan style floor look goes out of style, it’ll be really easy to change it all over again (hoping we’ll have real tile in our laundry room with a full remodel before that happens though).
Laundry is my least favorite chore, but I have to admit this room has made it a more pleasant task.
If you want to know about any of the sources or other DIY projects we did in our laundry room, you can see it all in this room reveal post.
Got any other great flooring refresh solutions you’ve used before? I’d love to hear about them to make this a great resource for others! Share them below in the comments.
The post How Our Patterned Vinyl Tile Is Holding Up 10 Months Later appeared first on Bless'er House.
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