I have horrible bathrooms. Somebody flipped my house and utterly ruined the kitchens and bathrooms - I’ve finally gotten the kitchen the way I want it, but we’re doing the floors in the bedrooms before we even think about redoing bathrooms. So I’m stuck with the cheapest, crappiest sheet vinyl and an awful vanity and a horrible one piece drop in tub thing… ugh.
So today I sawthis. It’s a couple documenting painting their crappy vinyl floor in a laundry room (a room, of course, that has no fixtures to work around.) It looks great and they’ve had it for five months with no problems.
So has anybody done it? Happy, unhappy with it?
If I want to do it, am I going to tear my hair out working around the toilet? Am I being too ambitious considering a stencil like this? What about the parts where they didn’t bother to really lay the floor right and the joints between the vinyl are curling up a bit?
And how should I go about painting that ugly-ass vanity? What kind of paint, and what kind of prep?
I accidentally went over the line a little bit when trying to paint part of the basement floor while leaving the rest as vinyl tile. So, there are some areas of the tiles that got painted. They have lasted perhaps 12 years now and look fine. The paint was a two part epoxy paint that was especially for floors but not especially for covering vinyl. I don’t remember what surfaces it was intended for but I planned to be painting bare concrete.
My painted areas are a small sample, though, and not where the heaviest foot traffic is.
I can’t imagine any kind of paint working on a non-porous floor, other than epoxy on concrete. Even good floor enamel on prepped wood has pretty poor wear characteristics. I think you’d get horrible peeling, scrapes, etc.
I think you’d get more mileage out of laying some inexpensive but not horrid vinyl over what’s there, with the intent of tearing it out to a clean substrate within the year.
ETA: This would probably be cheaper than any proper epoxy paint and prep, and more durable. The room is small enough to look at remnants and returns and save even more money.
I’ve considered it, even done some research on it, and I decided it was not going to be worth the effort. Our kitchen floor is in even worse shape than that shown in the linked project—and twice as ugly—but we’ll just live with it until we can afford to pull up the 3 existing layers (!) and put in a decent floor. (We would just put in a new layer of vinyl to hold us over, but our kitchen is 13 feet wide, so outside the available width for vinyl flooring.) I doubt the method used in the link would hold up for long in our multi-dog, gravel-driveway household.
I’ve also considered decoupaging the floor. I could think of some really cool things to do with that :D. Still too much trouble just for a temporary fix, though. Once you get to a certain age, you start to consider time spent on a project to be as important as financial cost, so obviously YMMV.
I’ve not actually taken the time to do it, but I keep threatening to either paint or spray paint mine doing approximately what they describe (clean, sand, prime, paint, coat).
I just haven’t gotten around to it yet.
I mod-podged my ugly ass vanity. It worked rather well.
I don’t understand why they went through all that instead of just laying new vinyl. In a big empty space how hard could it have been?
I can see wanting to do it in your bathroom, though. That’s way more complicated than putting vinyl in that example empty room.
I recently did my aunt’s bathroom using inter-locking vinyl tiles. The locking keeps water from getting up and under the tile. Pretty cool, and easier than a large vinyl sheet. You just need a little muscle (and/or patience) to cut through it with a knife cuz it’s very tough.