Entry Redo – Flooring

Flooring Weirdness

Do you have some strange areas in your home that make you wonder what the builder or previous owner was thinking? Our entry has two of those strange things. One of those is the fact that there are two coat closets in our entry which means there are FIVE doors in the entry. Crazy, right! As of this writing I have not painted those yet, but I do have exciting plans for those doors.

I cannot do anything about the fact that there are five doors, I can however, do something about the other weird anomaly that the builder decided was appropriate.  They finished this single space with half carpet and half wood floor. This is weirdness on so many levels but the one that is most disturbing to me is why carpet? That piece of carpet always looked bad. Two of the three doors to enter our home are in that space. So LOTS of traffic goes through there. You can just imagine how horrible it looked all the time.

Decision Time

I was not ready to replace all the flooring on the first level of our two story home, but I was ready to ditch the weirdness, especially since I was already painting and making other improvements to the space. Making the decision of what type of flooring to choose was a process of elimination.

We have two Boxer babies, so wood flooring was not an option. For reasons already mentioned, carpet was definitely not happening. While there are many other flooring choices like laminate and bamboo, I wanted something with WOW factor. Since it was a relatively small project and in a few years we will be replacing all the flooring I decided on a marble look ceramic tile.

A Little Disappointment

I’ve always wanted to learn how to lay tile myself, I even purchased a used wet tile saw for this and future projects. In anticipation I watched Youtube and read blogs about laying tile. Much to my disappointment I did not get to lay the tile and my tile saw could not be used for this project either. It was just a few weeks before Thanksgiving and I would not have time to finish the floor myself. So we hired a friend to do it.

My husband and I did help remove the old flooring, but that was pretty much the extent of our “helping”. Well that and making sure Jason had lots of coffee each time he came to work on our little project. It was a little project that took longer than any of us anticipated.

The Trouble I Caused

First I decided I wanted the tile laid at a diagonal and second I choose 18″ tiles instead of 12″. You might wonder why those two things would make the project take longer. I had thought bigger tiles would mean less cutting. Since one tile would cover more surface there would be less pieces to lay. I was wrong. Fitting those larger tiles into the smallish space took some time.

The tile saw I had purchased had a 7″ blade which would not be a match for the 18″ tiles. Even the large commercial saw he ended up using had trouble cutting the tiles on the diagonal. He had to cut them from one corner to the center, flip the tile around and cut from that side to the center.  I had to keep apologizing to him for being so much trouble.

Flooring Joy

I’m in love with how well it looks. The white tile with gray marbling and the dark gray grout. It’s perfect with the Cathedral Stone paint on the walls and the white trim. Best of all the one room now has ONE type of flooring. No more flooring weirdness. Not to mention the new light fixture and what I did to the ceiling. I’ll be revealing that in a future post.

What flooring decisions are you making? Do you have any flooring success or weirdness to share? I’d love to hear from you so please share in the comments below.

Blessings,

Lauree

…keep dancing the dream

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