We love our tiny house, but that doesn’t mean it has to stay the same. Over the past few years, we have put our home through the ringer. It has hosted over 50,000 guests, traveled over 46,000 miles and been subjected to all kinds of climates and weather. It’s held up beautifully, but our floors have really taken a beating. Though we love the look of hardwood, we needed something more durable. That’s why we are so excited to to upgrade our tiny house by installing Pergo’s new, beautiful TimberCraft +WetProtect laminate flooring.
When your house is only 130 sq. ft., you basically use everything and interact with every surface, every day, especially the floors. We installed and sealed our original floors three years ago. Since then they’ve become worn from foot traffic and moisture issues. Keeping water off the hardwood floors has been a major challenge. As a consequence, the finish has worn away and exposed the raw wood. This means the floors wear down faster. What’s more, it causes the boards to expand, creating gaps between the seams. Dirt accumulates here. It became a burden to clean. We could sweep and sweep and sweep and never get it all out. To continue maintaining these floors, we would need to refinish every year or so.
With more travel and open houses planned, this is the ideal time for us to make a big flooring change. Pergo TimberCraft +WetProtect is a perfect match for our traveling tiny house. What’s really appealing is that you can have the authentic look and feel of hardwood but with complete waterproof protection. It even has a lifetime guarantee. Unlike other laminate flooring products, TimberCraft uses twice as many unique plank designs that are hand-selected from premium cuts of wood from around the country. It’s virtually indistinguishable from real hardwood.
In order to update the floors, we had to remove our built-in furniture and empty out our tiny house. No small task. It was actually a great time to freshen up our space by repainting the walls and painting the ceiling white. The dormers in our master loft are still natural wood, which I always enjoy gazing at in the morning. With the gable now painted white, it makes our living space feel bigger and, of course, much brighter.After all the paint dried, we cleaned our old floors as best as we could. We even dug dirt out from the flooring seams. Next, Christian laid the Pergo Gold underlayment over the old floors — used for sound, thermal and extra moisture protection. Fortunately, the TimberCraft flooring for our entire tiny house weighs less than 200 pounds—about half the weight of hardwood. That’s like adding a person! With tiny houses on wheels, you always need to keep track of your house weight to avoid overloading your trailer.
Christian cut the underlayment to fit along each corner and sealed it with tape. Next, he began laying the flooring planks. It is a super simple installation process, which is great for the less experienced DIYer. The locking engineered planks easily click together. Due to our tight quarters, especially in the closet and under the counters, Christian had to cut multiple pieces to fit everything just right, which was a little on the tedious side. Once the entire floor was laid, he caulked the edges along the wall. This step completes the waterproofing. No water is getting between these boards. And no dirt!
We are genuinely blown away by how beautiful the floors turned out. Like a pristine new hardwood floor but so much easier to install and maintain. With our next several months of travel planned, including multiple tiny house festivals, we will definitely be putting these new floors to the test. Stay tuned for updates from the road
We chose Pergo’s TimberCraft +WetProtect flooring in Crest Ridge Hickory. If you’re interested in trying it out, you can order a sample of one the many available colors.
Plan for your own tiny home renovation using these tips: http://tinyhouseblog.com/how-to-2/diy-tiny-home-renovation-planning
-Alexis, Tiny House Blog Contributor
My partner, Christian and I are traveling tiny house dwellers. Together we’ve been on the road two years for our documentary and community outreach project, Tiny House Expedition. We live, breathe, dream the tiny home community every day. This is our life and our true passion project. We are very grateful to be able to experience this inspiring movement in such an intimate way and to be able to share our exploration with all of you.
Love the floors! Cool post.