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I put sheet vinyl flooring in the bathroom. It is the least favorite of my flooring types. By least favorite I mean least favorite to install.

Here are my rankings, in order of easiest to hardest to install:

• Vinyl tiles are the easiest to install but they are also the easiest to mess up.
• Laminate flooring is easy to install. Plus it is not permanent – you can remove it with no destruction to the sub-floor.
• Ceramic tile is nice because the grout will fill in many mistakes. But it requires the most surface prep and can be messy.
• Sheet vinyl is awful because of the large size (unwieldy to maneuver) and messy glue.

I have not installed hardwood floor, but I assume I will like it slightly less than laminate.  I plan on never installing carpet myself, so I’m not going to rate its ease of installation.  (Carpet, drywall, and now sheet vinyl are on my list of things that are not do-it-yourself).  Also, thinset and grout for ceramic tile can be messy, but they clean easily. Vinyl glue is messy and does not clean easily.

Sub-Floor

Ceramic tile needs a flat, solid surface. That would not have worked in the bathroom that now has the sheet vinyl flooring. That floor was not level and not even, so it would have taken quite a few fixes to get the sub-floor in good shape for the ceramic tile. But for the sheet vinyl, we just put down luan plywood so that the surface is smooth. That left slopes and dips and such, but the vinyl conforms to that pretty well.

My Experience

The worst part about the sheet vinyl was the gluing part. The sheet was cut to fit the room exactly. The room is not square – it is more like a L shape. So I couldn’t just unroll it, because no matter which way I rolled it, it was longer than the part of the room where I was rolling it.

The theory is that you spread the glue on the floor and then put the sheet of vinyl on top of that. Then you press it down with a heavy roller and you’re done. If your room doesn’t change width at all, then it might be that easy for you. But if your room has angles or changes widths, think twice about sheet vinyl (or contract it to a professional installer).

Because I could not unroll my vinyl in one shot, I couldn’t put all the glue down at once. The vinyl is thick enough so that it won’t conform nicely. If your roll of vinyl is 8′ 3″ and your walls are 8′ 2.5″, then it’s not going to unroll. It just gets stuck and scrapes your wall. But the vinyl is thin enough that it will tear if you pull on it and it will crease (and tear) if it gets folded.

For my L-shaped room, I had to put the vinyl in place first. Since I couldn’t unroll it, I had to carefully bend it. Once it was in place, I peeled back one leg of the L, put the glue down, and put the vinyl back in place. Then I had to peel back the unglued part of the vinyl. That was both the corner and the other leg of the L. So I had to do two folds or bends without creasing it. Watch the corners – those are the first places that the vinyl starts to rip. But I got it in place, spread the glue on the floor, and restored the remained of the vinyl to its proper place.

All that had to be done with the door closed, because the door opens inward. And the glue gets all over the handle of the trowel but it does not come off very easily. And it has fumes, so I had to keep the window open, which is normally a bad thing to do when it is freezing outside.

Finally, the floor was glued. Then I had to roll it with the 100-lb roller thingy. There was once spot that had a bubble. I would roll over the bubble and the bubble would be pushed along. But as soon as I flattened it there, it would pop back up over where it started. There are no bubbles with any other flooring types.  They cooperate nicely.  But sheet vinyl does not.

One Chance Only

And the last knock against sheet vinyl is that it is all or nothing when you install it. With the vinyl squares, if one goes on crooked you can peel it up and try again. If a square gets damaged, you can throw it out and use the next one and you’ll lose only a dollar or so. The same is true for ceramic tile or laminate flooring or hardwood flooring. But sheet vinyl is not so nice. Once you put it down, it’s not coming back up. Theoretically, you could try to pull it off the glue and re-set it.  But I don’t want to even think about that.

And if it gets damaged in the process, you’ve lost $100-$200. Or you can try to repair it, which will either look bad or create seams. And the reason to get the sheet vinyl is so there are no seams. And don’t forget about the cutting of holes.  I had to cut holes in the sheet for this like the plumbing and the heat vent.  You have to measure very carefully and cut very carefully.  Otherwise you ruin the sheet.  With tiles (ceramic or vinyl), you just mess up a single tile at worst, and it’s not that much of a setback.  If you mess up multiple tiles trying to get a single hole or notch cut, then maybe you should re-think the idea of installing it yourself.

Seams and Gaps

The vinyl tiles (peel and stick) are the simplest to install and are great for small spaces, not much square footage. The problem is that you need to align the edges perfectly. Ceramic tile is similar, but the edges don’t need to be perfect because there are gaps between tiles and they are filled with grout. So slight offsets are okay, because they will be helped by the grout. But with vinyl tile, there is no grout because there are not supposed to be any gaps. If one tile is skewed ever so slightly, there will be a noticeable gap somewhere in the floor.  If the tiles are not perfect, you will notice it.

Conclusion

There’s just too much that can go wrong, too much to worry about, when installing the sheet of vinyl.  Main complaints: the glue is annoying and the big sheet is awkward.  I like ceramic tile for bathrooms.

One of the other craft things we did over the Christmas break was rubber-band nail boards.  These are the boards with lots of nails/pegs so that someone can stretch rubber bands in various shapes.  This was our do-it-yourself/build-your-own craft for the week.  The kids like playing with these at the children’s museums (musea?), so my wife thought they would like to have their own.

Cost:

• 1×12 board (4′ long): about $5
• a box of 1″ panel nails (250 count): about $3
• a box of rubber bands: about $1

Total: $9

Time:

• cut and rout boards: 15 minutes
• mark points on the board: 5 minutes
• pound nails into the board: 30 minutes

Total: 50 minutes

The kids spent about 30 minutes playing with the boards after they were done, so it’s a little pricey at $9 per child-hour of play.  But I expect the rate to come down as they play more.

Details:

I started with a 1×12 board and cut it into a couple of 12×12 squares so that each child could have his own board.  Then I routed the edges so that they were not so sharp – better child-friendliness.

Then I marked a grid of 100 dots to show where the nails were to go.  I spaced them 1 inch apart, as that worked out rather nicely for the 12×12 square.  Then the 3-year-old helped me pound in the nails.  I started by drilling starter holes with a small drill bit, but it wasn’t worth it.  I thought I could just push the nails into the holes and then the child could nail them the rest of the way.  But it didn’t work that way.  It was easier for me to just start nailing – hit the nail a couple of times and then let the kid finish the nail.  I did have to watch it though and tell him when to stop pounding.  Otherwise he would put the nail all the way down into the board.  Since the nail is slightly longer than the board is thick, that would be a problem.

The nails did not end up to be very straight, but that’s not all the 3-year-old’s fault.  I did the second board by myself and the nails were similarly crooked.

I decided to make a craft with/for the kids. Here are the details.

• Magnets: 12 for $1 = 8.3c per pole
• Poles: 2 for $1 = 50c per pole
• Washers: 30 for $1 = 3c per fish
• String: free from the garage
• Paper: free from just about anywhere

Total per fishing pole: about $0.60
Time spent occupying the kids’ attention: 1.5 hours (includes helping with construction and also playing time)
Not a bad deal when compared to any commercial ventures intended for entertaining kids for that amount of time…

The pole was a dowel from the local big-box hardware-type store.  They come in 4-foot lengths, so I bought one, cut it in half, and had two 2-foot poles for the kids.  I then stapled (using my construction-type stapler, not a standard paper stapler) a 3-foot length of string to the end of each pole.

I took the magnets that we bought and drilled a hole in the middle of two of them (one per pole).  The magnets were the soft (plastic) type, not the hard (ceramic) type.  The ceramic type are going to be more powerful, but also more brittle and I wouldn’t want to drill a hole in one of them.  I used a small drill bit, the type used for wood, for the magnet.  The size was just slightly larger than the string, so that I could thread the string through the hole.  I did not put the bit into a drill – I just twisted it by hand.  Yes, the magnets are that soft.  After threading the string through the hole, I tied a knot in the end to keep the string from unthreading itself.

While I was doing that, the kids were coloring fish that I had cut out of paper.  The fish were between two and three inches long.  Once the children were finished coloring the fish, I taped the washers to them.

And then?  We tested everything – put the fish on a chair and have each child try to pick up a fish using the magnet on the end of the pole.  They worked adequately, although I would have liked stronger magnets because the magnets we got don’t have much of a grip.  They pick up the fish most of the time but they fall off easily.

The kids slightly enjoyed fishing with the poles.  What they really like doing with the poles is pretending they are bows, as in bows and arrows.  There are no arrows, but that doesn’t stop them.  Since I made the strings longer than the poles, the children started having fun wrapping the string around the pole.  Then they noticed if they wrapped only the end of the string around the other end of the pole, that left some extra string in the middle.  That extra string resembled a bow, so they started pointing it at things and shooting “arrows”.

We don’t vacuum under the bed much. Recently though, a friend rearranged our bedroom furniture slightly and so some of it got cleaned.

A couple of days later, I was vacuuming the living room and the vacuum was smoking. That’s not a good sign, so I leaned closer for a good look. No, nothing bad happened. But I did see that it wasn’t smoke – it was dust. The vacuum was just throwing dust around instead of sucking it up. I figured the problem was that I hadn’t changed the bag in a few months. But my wife informed me that they changed the bag when they cleaned the bedroom. So it wasn’t the bag.

I then flipped the vacuum up slightly to check the rotating brush thingy. That was spinning like it looked like it should. I took the wand thingy and tried that. It worked great – pulling in all the pieces of debris that I put it near. So I put the wand back, and the sound of the vacuum changed, like the wand was plugged.

I flipped the vacuum over (after turning it off) and traced the path that dust would have to follow to go from the floor to the bag. I found a connecting tube from the brush to the wand, and the tube was full of dust/paper/hair/etc. The tube is on the left side in the picture below.  I cleaned that out (needle-nose pliers are your friend) and the vacuum worked again.

So clean regularly, otherwise the build-up of dust can overwhelm your vacuum cleaner. I suppose the alternative is not to vacuum at all. That will also keep your vacuum cleaner in good shape.

Inspired by my brother’s success story of how well his basement was improved by glass-block windows, I decided to have glass block installed in my basement.  Also, my wife had been mentioning that it would be a good thing to do.  I called a local glass-block window installer, and he quoted $360 ($120 for the 3 windows).  In case you’re comparing your own basement windows, mine were 33 inches wide by 17 inches tall, so the glass block windows use 8 inch by 8 inch blocks, 4 wide and 2 high.

I felt like not spending that much money, so I declined his quote and decided to do it myself.  My wife, knowing how I like to start projects but not finish them, gave me a deadline of one month.  It was the beginning of October when I bought the materials, and she said if they were not installed by November 1st, I had to return the stuff to the store.  Two of the three windows were done on October 18th, and the third one was installed on the 25th, so I beat the deadline.  I just need to grout the joints of the last window, and it’s done.

Was it worth it?  I spent $98.45 per window, saving $21.55 per window or $64.65 overall.  But I spent 11 hours on the project, making my hourly rate about $5.88.  Maybe it would have been better to hire the guy.  But now I have experience installing glass block windows, and I got to spend quality time with my sons as they helped me with the project, and it’s not like I would have earned $60 more dollars if I had those 11 hours to do something else.

The main improvement is that there is now natural light in the basement.  Before, because they were so old and in bad shape, the windows were boarded over, so that room in the basement had only a single light bulb.  Now, during the day, I don’t need to turn on the light bulb because there is so much light.  The old windows were wood-framed and single-pane.  So they let in water and outside air, and let out the inside air (which, with winter starting and the furnace running, is not good).  The only thing the glass blocks let in is light.

Details:

Cost:

• glass blocks: 8 for $37.63 = $37.63 per window
• railings: 6 for $49.74 = $16.58 per window
• horizontal spacers: 3 for $13.05 = $4.35 per window
• vertical spacers: 20 for $25.18 = $1.26 per spacer or $7.56 per window (plus $2.50 in waste)
• sealant: 3 tubes for $17.64 = $5.88 per window
• grout: $26.40 or $8.80 per window
• lumber for  spacers: $49 = $16.33 per window
• caulk for spacers: $3.97 or $1.32 per window

Extra items that I’ll use again so they don’t count against this project:

• grout float: about $5
• grout sponge: about $2

Time:

• 2 hours (over 3 different occasions) of trips to the store to buy the materials
• 1 hour for setup
• 1 hour for tearing out the old windows
• 2 hours for installing the first window
• 1 hour for installing the second window
• 2 hours for installing the third window
• 2 hours for grouting

Setup consisted of opening the boxes, explaining each item to my two little helpers, taking price stickers off the windows, reading the instructions to figure out how to proceed, etc.   The glass blocks came in boxes of 8, so that was perfect for my situation.  The store sold assembled windows (a 4 by 2 block window), but they all came with the fresh-air vent, which I did not want.

The first window took a while, because of the learning curve, both of the glass-block installation procedure and also how to work with my basement window openings.  My window openings were about an inch or inch-and-a-half too big in each direction, so I had to install a board on each side to act as a spacer, making the window opening just a bit smaller so the glass blocks fit snugly.  My main problem was that the saw was upstairs in the garage, so I would measure a board, take it up to cut it, come back and install it, etc.  If I had the saw in the basement, where the work was occurring, that would have saved a lot of time.

The third window should have taken less than an hour to install, as I was getting faster with each window.  But that window had dirt piled around it outside, so I had to dig that away.  Then I discovered that the existing wood frame was rotten, from the wet dirt, so I had to cut out the rotten parts and replace them.  For the other windows I just left the existing wood and built onto it.

Here’s how much time it should take to install a window, if the opening is the right size.

• Cut railings and horizontal spacer to length: 10 minutes
• Install railings and glass blocks dry fit (assemble them in the window put don’t attach anything): 5 minutes
• Attach railings with screws and then place glass blocks with sealant: 10 minutes

So really, each window takes less than a half hour to install.  It’s just the preparation work that slows it down.  The grout doesn’t count in this time because the sealant has to cure for at least 24 hours before you can grout.  So wait for all the windows to be installed and cured, then grout them all at once.

Tips:

Cutting:

The railings and spacers are plastic.  My tip for cutting them is to start with a hacksaw and switch to a utility knife.  maybe my hacksaw was just getting dull, but it seemed like it was taking forever to cut each piece.  By the end, the method that worked best was to start the cut with the hacksaw, to get a straight line in the plastic – a groove for the utility knife to follow.  Once the groove was there, I ran the utility knife down the groove several times, attempting to bend the plastic after each run.  I guess the knife is more for scoring the piece than cutting it.  Once I could bend the plastic at the cut (the snap after the score – hey wait, this isn’t about football), the piece broke apart quite nicely and one more run of the knife finished the job.

Spacers:

If you have even more time than money, don’t buy the vertical spacers.  They are $1.26 per 8-inch spacer.  But they are the same as the horizontal spacers, just cut to size.  If you buy an extra 4-foot horizontal spacer and cut it yourself, it would be 40 inches / 8 inch spacers = 5 spacers for $4.35 or $0.87 per spacer.  On this project, that would have saved me (25.18 – 17.40 = 7.78).  But it would have taken at least an hour to cut the 18 pieces that I needed.  I think it’s not worth it.

Sealant:

The sealant gives some recommendation for how many blocks you can seal per tube, but I’ll give my experience here.  If you apply it sparingly, you could get one tube to last for 12 blocks (1.5 windows).  But I don’t recommend using it sparingly, so I suggest getting one tube for every 8 or so blocks.

Lumber:

For the lumber to fill the extra window space, I used 1x6s and 1/2x6s, about 27′ of length of clear pine.  That was the $49.  I could have saved some money by going for the lower grade of pine, and right now I don’t know why I didn’t.  Most of it is hidden, so it doesn’t need to be pretty.  I think I just didn’t want to be working around knots.

Grout:

The grout came in a medium-size bucket.  I mixed only half the powder, and that would have been enough for at least 10 windows.  So if you buy the 15-lb bucket of grout (and that’s the only size they carry), don’t use much of it.  I estimate a full bag would be good for 160 blocks.  I expect that an open bag of grout won’t keep indefinitely (it is plastic-lined to keep out moisture), so I don’t know what the point would be of using only a quarter of the grout and saving the rest.  That’s what helps the profit margin of the construction-products companies: people buy more than what they need and throw away the excess.  In this case, I would like to have bought a smaller container of grout mix, but I couldn’t.  And I could store the extra in an airtight container and save it for the next project, but I don’t know when that will be and storage space is at a premium.  So I’m just going to dispose of the extra grout mix when I’m done with the last window.

Hammering:

Even if you tell yourself you’re going to be careful, do not use a standard hammer around glass block. I was trying to adjust something next to the first window, just after I had installed the last block in that window. Unfortunately, the hammer missed its target slightly and broke a newly-installed glass block. Since the sealant was only a few minutes old, I could remove the block and install another one. But, as it was broken, that set me back about a half hour – removing the pieces, cleaning out the sealant from that opening, putting in new sealant, and putting in the new block. Little pieces of broken glass and sealant are not a good combination. So use a rubber mallet, not a hammer, around glass blocks.