Flooring and texture

I am a creature of texture. Everything in our apartment has to have a texture to feel alive, look alive. We struggled with the original flooring – it was 80s era granite, complete with dark speckles against grey that makes our living room look frigid cold. Together with the whitish beige walls – I would have frozen in tropical Singapore.

Our bedroom parquet was in a very sad state too.

We needed to re-do our living room floor but we were not in favour of hacking away the granite – it would have been too much work and too much time wasted. After much research, we decided to settle for lay-over vinyl planks. It was a much cheaper option than say, parquet (although I would have liked that if we had the money for it), and with the latest technology, vinyl planks can now be made to look very much like wood, complete with all the grains.

Installation was complete in just one day, hardly any downtime at all. And we were ready to move our things into the apartment right away once the flooring was all done. No nasty glue smells either – I was really picky about this and ensured it was top class glue used. The bedroom parquet was given a polish and new coat of varnish to repel water. All done in one day.

HOW MUCH WE SPENT

3mm thick Korean-made vinyl planks + aluminium edging + installation = SGD1900 based on 631 sq ft
Parquet polishing for 3 bedrooms = SGD600
Total budget came up to approx. SGD2500.

VERDICT

Totally satisfied with the wood-look alike vinyl. I like the grains very much – feels good to the touch and easy to clean. We chose a darker wood colour to add some warmth to the living room and also to camouflage any dirt. We don’t have a domestic helper sweeping and mopping floors all day long – that’ll be me, if anyone’s doing it at all. It’s also anti-slip and water-resistant by nature, so will help immensely when our toddler goes through toilet training later. Unlike ceramic tiled floor, we don’t have to deal with ugly, dirty grout. Some older generation of laminate flooring are not water resistant, so they warp over time due to water seepage. So far, our vinyl floor has been very good, and it is constantly subject to abuse by two very active kids in our household. Vinyl planks are widely used in Korea and China where floor heating is used during winter. Due to their heat-conducting property and thinness, the material is actually very well suited for all weather.

THE RESULTS

This is what our floor now looks like. Absolutely love the wood grains.