There’s only one room in the house that we haven’t touched since moving in… the back porch. While every other room has received some sort of upgrade, the back porch has remained in it’s wonderful move-in state of bright pink.

With the current layout of the house, the porch is the main entrance. The kiddos shed their muddy boots here. UPS leaves packages here. Friends and family drop by here. It’s the mud room and main foyer. And, oh yeah, it is covered in a tan carpet.

The porch before moving in.

The DW and I agreed that we’d get to the porch in due time since we both knew how well the carpet would hold up. Maybe in different circumstances it would be fine, but with having four kiddos using the porch as a mud room the carpet never had a chance. We held out as long as we could using various rugs and carpet remnants to protect the carpet the best we could. Eventually, it was just too much and one day this summer I just got tired of it and tore the carpet out.

While I was pleasantly surprised to find painted fir flooring under the carpet in decent shape – after the carpet was out, we cleaned it up and used it that way most the summer – it still wasn’t in good enough shape to paint with a porch paint and leave as is. Instead, we were lucky enough to find the same flooring we used in the kitchen (on sale) and last weekend I started laying the new floor.

Laying underlayment for the new floor.

The nice part about installing a glueless vinyl floor in a basic rectangular room is that once the prep work is done, it goes very fast. I was finished installing the underlayment and vinyl in just a few hours. All I have left is to reinstall a few more pieces or trim. How does it look? We’re still painting… I’ll share more next week.