We had painted our subfloor in the master bedroom and treated it as a art studio/office for a year or two, but then we could finally afford flooring (as long as we did the work ourselves). We had already done one bathroom which had been easy and were working on the downstairs open floor plan which had its own challenges but was also relatively easy, We had no idea what laid in store for us on this one though.
The bathroom had linoleum laid on top of luan. On our other bathroom this was great. We just laid COREtec Floor tiles on top and everything worked out beautifully. Since I hate thresholds in houses, I was determined not to have a step up from the bedroom to the bathroom. That luan had to go.
The destruction was only somewhat fun, I have to admit. but the cleanup was a nightmare.
First remove the shoe moulding. Then rip up the floor starting with the end at the doorway. The luan was stapled down every 6 inches or so. It took quite a while working with the hammer and pry bar to get it. Some staples just wouldn’t come out, so I dug the luan out from under them and hammered them flat. Make sure not to get distracted and forget one of the staples because your shoe or toe will shue as hell find it when you’re walking around and it’ll trip you. Once the destruction phase was over, we had to clean up. 50 gallon trash bags worked OK, but the sharp edges of the wood sliced right through a couple of them so I suggest double-bagging it.
Now that this was finished we could lay the floor. Which direction you lay the floor planks depends on your taste. some people say to lay the planks based on the position of the sun through the windows, some say you want to be perpendicular to the room entryway, etc. I just laid out a bunch of planks and figured which ones I liked better. Because it would be easier to not have any issues with the bathroom threshold are, I started laying the floor long-ways so that it ran straight into the bathroom as several pieces. In other words, perpendicular to the bathroom door.
Again a band saw and junior hacksaw are infinitely helpful on the intricate not-so-straight walls, cabinet, and under the toilet areas. The toilet was another challenge. In or other bathroom, we used a foam ring seal for the toilet. This worked fine because we laid our CORETec on top of the 1/8″ luan and linoleum floor. This time, I had ripped all of that up, so I had a big gap when I tried to screw the toilet to the floor. The gasket was just too fluffy. It sealed well, however sitting on the toilet felt like you were trying to balance on an exercise ball. To fix this, I tried two approaches. I got some commercial “toilet shims” from the hardware store, but these honestly sucked at this task. I ended up using them as wall spaces in my downstairs while installing the COREtec floor there.
The solution that worked best to fix the toilet was to take the toilet up and cut some COREtec in the shape of the toilet base, then sit the toilet on top of this. This gave stable support the the entire bottom of the toilet, and I was still able to get a good seal on the foam gasket. The foam gasket allows repositioning, unlike wax rings so it was good to go when I tightened the bolts. Cut the bolts to length with a dremel and put the caps on and the toilet is affixed.
While this fixed the wobble on the toilet issue, it looked bad. I decided to caulk the connection between the toilet and the floor, covering and hiding the spacer I had cut with white caulk. Now, there’s different perspectives on whether this is a good idea or not. Some people say it looks great, other people complain that if there is a leak, it’ll just go into the subfloor instead of leak from the toilet and you won’t know it until it’s really expensive to fix (like entire tens of thousands of dollars since it’s an upstairs bathroom). I waited a couple of months of use to make sure there weren’t any leaks before I caulked it. To get the cleanest lines, I masked around the edges with painters tape.
Once the floor was fully down, I went back and installed the shoe moulding. You can see in the pic above of the toilet, I messed up the moulding on the sink unit and had to flip it around, leaving a weird gap. I filled this in with brown caulk which matched perfectly.
