RV Carpet Replacement Mod
RVs no matter how new or old seem to always have carpet that nobody wants. I ripped out the carpet in our RV shortly after we started traveling because it held a ton of dirt no matter how many times we vacuumed.
A friend of mine asked me to help her pick out a new flooring to install since she was also sick of her carpet. She has a 2006 Fleetwood Tioga 27 foot and is a big reason we ended up getting a Class C. She let us use her rig in trade (I built her a chicken coop) to go to Bonnaroo back in 2011 and it hooked us on traveling.
After researching flooring choices other RVers were installing, I came across the Allure Ultra vinyl. She liked the look of the flooring along with the fact that it was 100% waterproof. She picked out the color she wanted which happened to be a special order so I proceeded to rip out the carpet while we waited and in my haste I forgot to take a picture.
Before Pics
There’s nothing particularly hard about ripping carpet out, it just takes a little elbow grease to coax it up. The hardest part is getting all the staples out or hammered down level with the floor. You would think you could just hammer them all flush but you can’t because usually there would be chunks of carpet padding or carpet stuck underneath the sta
ple. I swear there were staples every two inches around the perimeter. It helps if you use a flashlight and just run your hand along the floor to feel when you have all the staples out. I unscrewed the dining table ring and the front door stair nose which was the most I had to take apart since she didn’t have a slide.
After I got all the staples out and vacuumed it good, I started installing the flooring. She choose a wood plank looking vinyl so it was 7.5 inches wide and 48 inches long.
Meaning I had to make several different cuts around cabinets and chairs for each piece along the wall. Even though it is a smaller area, other than about 10 whole pieces, I had to cut every single plank that was installed.
The instructions said you could score the vinyl with razor, then snap it. You can do it like that, but you better have strong hands to snap it because it’s pretty sturdy. I cut mine with a miter saw and table saw with the crazy cuts on a jig saw.
Like laminate, it was a click method to install the planks. Unlike laminate, you can’t use any tools to help click the last run so I used a small pry bar against the wall and floor to get the planks clicked tight together.
I installed quarter round to hide the expansion gaps which also proved to be difficult due to all the different angles. The Allure line has matching molding but it’s really expensive and would have cost almost as much as the flooring.
I went to the molding aisle with a piece of flooring and matched it with another type of quarter round saving my friend a lot of money. I also found caulk that was a brownish color that matched the cabinets and flooring.
Her rig has several different level changes, from the cab to the living area, the dining table, the bedroom and then another step in the bedroom. The Allure says not to install the flooring vertically, but I glued it with liquid nails and capped it with a stainless steel stair nose.
Cutting a 45 degree angle on a stair nose took me a minute to figure out since it’s an L shaped bar and the screws go on top. After some regression back to geometry class, I got the angle I wanted without wasting too much of the stair nose.
After Pics
I think it came out looking really good. Now I get to do the same for our own rig, though I think we are looking at the ceramic tile looking vinyl by Allure which should be easier to install since they are only 12×12 tiles.
Over to you
Do you have any RV mods you’d like to share? We’d love to hear about them.
