So I’m also ramping up to do this as well as we absolutely despise carpet with a completely irrational passion. If there’s one thing MapNerd hates, it’s carpet in almost any form. Rugs are okay.
Anyway, I’ll share my approach in case it helps anyone else. Our rig is new and as such, we have tile on the main floor and carpet in the slides. However, we really only have carpet in the FWS as the kitchen slide and bedroom slides are covered by cabinets and the bed so there’s no carpet there at all. We considered installing laminate or even engineered but ran into two problems:
1. It’s really hard to find a good match to Newmar’s tile unless you’re using that tile
2. The Ventana has electric slides and as a result, my slideroom floor is not flush with the main floor. It’s raised by about a 1/4” - 1/2”, so installing any laminate, tile or hardwood in there, no matter how thin is going to make that transition worse.
So what I’ve done is taken the 4 extra tiles I got from Newmar when I picked up my rig, and I took them to an industrial printing business where they have massive, high quality scanners. Triangle Reprographics in Orlando is scanning the pattern of each of my four tiles as we speak.
Once I have those tile images, I’m going to toss them into graphics editor on my computer (eg. Photoshop) and create an very, very large image - one the length and width of my FWS. I will paste those images into the graphic, repeating them in the same pattern as the main floor, a basic 1/2 offset pattern. I’ll space each image 3/16” from each other, end to end and side to side and set the background color of the image to the same color as my main floor’s grout and I’ll randomize the four tile patterns so that the same tile is never next to itself in the image. This will give me a nice little image of a floor with my exact tiles.
Then, I’ll send that image to
Graphic Image Flooring where it will be printed onto a vinyl flooring sheet, rolled up and sent to me. I’ll then unroll it, let it acclimate inside the rig for a day. Remove the furniture, then the carpet, clean the floor, trim the vinyl and glue it down, trim out the edge of the slide floor, then reinstall the furniture.