Sheet vinyl for laundry rooms
in houses from every decade

How a sheet floor is made and what it is good at belongs on the sheet vinyl pillar. What this page is for is the room it is going into, and in this city that room refuses to be predictable. Lake Saint Louis has been building without a pause for about fifty years, and where a house puts its laundry room has changed several times over that stretch. A laundry in a lower level, a laundry tucked behind a folding door in a hall and a laundry on the same level as the bedrooms are three different rooms with three different sets of consequences, and none of them is visible from the street.

The first question is simply where the room is

In some cities you can guess. Here you cannot, and we have stopped trying. The laundry might be in the basement, where the floor is likely on concrete and the room shares space with mechanicals. It might be a closet sized alcove off a hall, where the machines fill the space and the floor is mostly what you cannot see. It might be a proper room on the same level as the bedrooms.

That location decides almost everything else: how the material gets into the room, whether the machines can be moved without a fight, what the floor is sitting on, and what happens underneath if a hose ever lets go. So the first thing we do is stand in the doorway and look, which is one of the reasons the visit is free and the phone quote does not exist.

A lower level laundry, and the room it shares

If the room is below the main level, the floor underneath is usually concrete and the consequence of water is contained to that level. The work is about getting a clean, continuous surface across a space that may not be square and may have a drain, a step or a mechanical closet in it.

Where a laundry has been reworked at some point there is sometimes a step or a slight change of level at the door, and a continuous floor has to finish cleanly against it rather than ride over it. So the measure takes the room as it sits rather than as a rectangle: whether it is square, whether the floor is level across the space, and whether the room has been changed since the house was finished. Those are three short answers, and all three of them come from standing in the room.

The machines are part of the measurement, not an afterthought

A laundry floor is fitted around two heavy appliances that have to come out and go back. So we note how they come out, whether the room is wide enough to walk them past each other, what the connections are doing, and whether a pedestal is in play. We also look for somewhere they can stand while the floor goes down, because a room this size has no spare corner and the hall outside it is often the only candidate.

None of this is complicated work, but all of it is work that has to be seen. It is the difference between an install that takes an afternoon and one that stops halfway because something would not fit back where it came from.

Getting a piece that will not fold into the room it is for

Sheet goods arrive as one wide piece, which is the point of them and also the part that has to get through your house. So part of the visit is the route in: the door you come through, the hall, the turn at the top or the bottom of a stair, and the width of the doorway into the room itself. Whether a room can be covered with no seam in it at all, and where a seam goes when it cannot, is set out on the sheet vinyl page. What we settle standing in your house is whether the material can reach the room in the condition it needs to arrive in.

That is exactly the sort of detail nobody remembers to mention on the phone and everybody points out within ten seconds of us standing in the room. It is not a problem. It is just information, and having it before ordering is what keeps the day of the install boring.

A roll is judged unrolled, never on a rack

A roll standing on a rack shows you an edge and a few inches of its face, which is not enough to choose from. Ask to have it unrolled across the showroom floor so you are looking at the goods lying flat, the way they will lie in your room. How a pattern reads at full width, and what the wear layer and the backing are doing underneath it, are covered on the sheet vinyl page.

Lake Saint Louis is 6.1 road miles out, and the Lake Saint Louis page covers what that drive is worth. The thing worth bringing back with you is the room itself: the clearance the machines actually leave, the width of the doorway, and a photograph taken from the doorway rather than from inside.

What the measure records in a laundry here

• Where the room is in the house and what is directly underneath it
• How the machines come out and go back, what the connections are doing behind them, and whether a pedestal or a utility sink is in the way
• What is on the floor now, how many layers it is, and how flat the surface underneath turns out to be
• The route from the front door to the room, and every turn a full width piece has to make on the way
• Whether the room is square, and whether the floor sits level across it
• Where a step or a change of level puts the edge of the new floor

If a Lake Saint Louis laundry wants something harder

Sheet is not the only sensible answer for a wet room, and we are happy to talk you out of it. If you want a floor that reads as a finished room rather than a utility space, tile in Lake Saint Louis is the comparison to make, and the plank version of the same instinct is luxury vinyl plank in Lake Saint Louis. If the laundry is upstairs next to bedrooms that are staying soft, carpet in Lake Saint Louis covers the rest of that floor. What a visit involves is on the in home measure page, and the city is described on the Lake Saint Louis page.