Marmoleum Flooring

I've had an infatuation with Marmoleum for a long time. It goes way back, before we built the yurt, and long before we started our home. I couldn't believe I could purchase lime green flooring and not have to color, dye or otherwise create my own personal version of color heaven (this "crock-pot green" obsession started when I got THIS PIECE from Mom, which is now selling for the low low price of $728 on amazon. I'm obsessed - everything must match it).

  

There is plenty of inspiration for Marmoleum ideas on the internet - so we perused our options and Erin slowly talked me down from the ledge of "crock-pot green" bathroom floors. We liked the look of this guy's cabin floor. Random. Modern.

 And this person's kitchen. Orderly. Stripey.

I was still hankering for the greens though...

We continued to research and discovered we were about to go down a costly path. Marmoleum, in any form - tile, Click, sheet - is expensive. Then there's the adhesive - also costly. We decided we would install it in our bathroom because we still needed bathroom flooring, it's good around water if you heat-weld your seams (we didn't), and our bedroom would be too expensive to cover in the stuff. We needed about 70 square feet, and began scouring craigslist for overages, extras, castoffs - we're those kind of people.

Lo, we found a store 1.5 hours away that was selling discontinued colors for discounted prices! We made the trek, picked up a box of beautiful grey sky blue 13" square tiles, and headed home where we promptly decided we didn't like the color. They are now for sale. Post in the comments if you want them.

 Thinking we'd already exhausted our local flooring stores for options, both of which would only special order Marmoleum flooring and, as Marmoleum dealers, had to install it themselves, we were stumped. Then we remembered what awesome, creative, DIYers we are, so we went back and talked the salespeople into parting with a few large scrap pieces of Marmoleum sheeting in brown, dark grey and light grey for a grand total of $50. Win!

We decided to forgo the expensive Forbo Marmoleum flooring adhesive, and on recommendation from another website (can't remember where) we purchased a tub of this stuff for about $5 from our hardware store:

 

Designing the layout of the scraps proved easy enough, and we carefully cut each piece to size with a razor knife. Oh yeah, they also tell you you need to rent a 100 pound roller to roll the seams. I'm going to go out on a limb and say you don't need one. We made one with a sonotube and some leftover concrete, carried it upstairs and rolled it around on the freshly installed floor. Like I said, DIY.

It is not easy to take photos of bathrooms.

We are out of toilet paper. DIY Marmoleum Floor.

Dark grey, brown, light grey, brown, dark grey, brown, light grey. DIY Marmoleum floor.

Overall, it is awesome and I absolutely love it. It is my favorite of all our 4 floors. Warm on the feet, classy, and cheap. I think it would be the perfect yurt floor - durable, comes in sheets or tiles, seemingly endless color choices, and inexpensive if you do what we did. Its environmental score-card is also worth mentioning - its impact on the natrual world, from the extraction of the raw materials to the disposal of the product at the end of its useful life, ranks it First as a nature-friendly floor covering (and we even used scrap - it doesn't get greener than that!).

Speaking of green... in the end, I'm glad it doesn't match our crock pot, or our bedroom wall.