Flooring Installation on San Juan Island

Luxury vinyl plank has become the go-to floor for island rentals, cabins, mudrooms, and basements, for good reason. It doesn't care about wet boots, sandy dogs, or a damp crawlspace underneath, and it's tough enough for a house that gets rented all summer. Laminate is the drier-room cousin: good looking, cheaper, and less forgiving of water.

Both are click-together floating floors, and both fail the same way when the prep is skipped. If the subfloor has a hump or a dip, the joints flex, the locking edges wear, and within a year you've got gaps and a hollow sound underfoot. Most of the work in a good install is before the first plank goes down: pulling baseboards, checking flat with a long straightedge, grinding high spots, filling low ones, and undercutting door casings so the floor slides under instead of being caulked against them.

Then it's layout, so you don't end up with a two-inch strip at a doorway; expansion gaps at every wall; clean transitions to tile, carpet, and stairs; and baseboard or shoe molding put back so it looks like the floor was always there.

Order early. Flooring is bulky and heavy and doesn't come from an island store. I'll give you square footage with the right waste factor so you only order once, and it needs to sit in the house for a couple of days to acclimate before it goes down. Winter is the best time for a flooring job in a second home, since nobody has to live around it.