Studio unit finish-out — flooring, kitchenette and trim
This studio unit in Washington County, Utah was finished out with grey-oak laminate plank flooring, a white shaker kitchenette and new baseboard throughout. A small accessory dwelling unit is the right size of job for one person doing several trades — flooring, cabinet setting, trim and the transitions between them are one continuous piece of work rather than four subcontractors waiting on each other.
Why a small unit suits one person
An ADU is small enough that the trades overlap constantly. The flooring has to be in before the base goes on, the base has to work around the cabinet toe-kicks, the transitions at the step have to be set before either, and the appliance openings have to be right before the counter arrives.
With four subcontractors that is four scheduling handoffs, each one a chance to wait a week. With one person it is a sequence.
The stepped landing
There is a step in this unit’s floor, which is the fussiest detail in the job. Running a floating floor over a level change means the nosing has to be fixed while the field is still allowed to float, and the plank pattern has to carry across the step so the eye reads one floor rather than two.
Done casually you get a visible gap at the nosing where the floor has moved away from a fixed trim piece. That is the failure to look for at any level change in a floating floor, and it is worth checking on any quote.
Laminate was the right call here
A rental studio wants the hardest wear surface available for the money, and laminate’s melamine top layer beats luxury vinyl on scratch resistance. There is no bathroom in the run shown here — where there had been, that room would have been vinyl plank instead, because laminate does not belong anywhere water can stand.
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The trades in this job
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