Mr. Brz likes the idea of ceramic tile counters and doesn’t need any elaborate justification. Unfortunately a couple of issues are hindering the advancement of counter materials in Texas from laminate to tile.

• Measurement of the stove space shows exactly 30″… no more, no less meaning even the thinnest tile might interfere with stove installation.
• The bid for a simple 6×6″ tile counter and backsplash was higher than anticipated– $800. The bid for comparable custom laminate was under $400. If we had time to do the work ourselves, it might work, but looks like this time around it’s just not happening.

Bummer

When the nice tile-lady arrived today, she measured the floor and came up with a total of 777 sq. ft.  If anyone around here were even the teensiest bit superstitious, this would be a very nice number indeed. Since that’s not the case, I’m just glad it’s easy to remember.

We decided on the terracotta-colored tile for the bedrooms, living room, kitchen and utility room. We’re going with a lighter color for the bathroom just for grins. Frankly, choosing tile and grout color makes me wonky and until the job’s finished there’ll be no rest for the weary… or whoever. Mr. Brz is resting much better knowing the ceramic tile’s going in and doesn’t really give a flip about colors, silly man.

JoJo the Wonderdog,  for no particular reason except he’s cute with teddy in his chops

Popularity: 21% [?]

Tags: ceramic tile, ceramic tile floor, flooring, laminate counters, tile counters

At high noon, the mister heads out the door for an afternoon of fun and profit sanding kitchen cabinet doors. At 12:01, Mrs. Brz heads out the door to visit her mother. At 12:04, the phone rings, child-unit #3 fields an emergency call from a highly agitated Mr. Brz.  At 12:08, a face appears at the mother-in-law’s window. Much hand waving and wild pantomime ensues indicating a state of family emergency. 

The amplitude of gesturing and jumping  indicates some terrible tragedy has befallen us… perhaps a tiny Cat 5 hurricane swept through Chambers county overnight hitting the investment house dead-center, leaving destruction and mayhem in its wake? Or maybe a band of marauding wombats has taken up residence in the kitchen, keeping the mister from his appointed sanding duties? Or maybe city hall’s called another emergency meeting to demand even larger checks?

No… it appears the peel-n-stick tile is not sticking.

Having known this man 30 years (and having witnessed a wide variety of panic maneuvers), it did cross my mind that the emergency at hand might be slightly less earth shattering than indicated.  But the mister is usually right, even with evidence to the contrary. He’s the smartest guy ever. Sometimes he can’t articulate exactly what’s wrong, but all that fancy dancing usually has a basis firmly anchored far, far away in the mist-shrouded regions of solid fact. And being a very smart wife indeed, I trust those instincts even when he’s doing The-Sky-Is-Falling dance on mom’s front deck.

So an emergency conference is called, tiles are examined, corners are declared un-stuck when they’re stuck perfectly fine, the mister decides the house ‘needs’ ceramic tile and the budget’s taking another hit for the home team.

This looks like a perfect time to bring up my theory on ceramic tile counters

We’re thinking about the terracotta colored tile on the top row… the same color as the dirt in the yard. Prices have increased since our last installation from $3/sq. ft. to $3.60/sq. ft.

Popularity: 21% [?]

Tags: ceramic tile, flooring, peel-n-stick, Rehab

An experimental pine floor installed in a rent house kitchen has held up well. Mr. Brz used a combination of 6 and 8″ boards (the type generally used for shelving), beveled the edges and used Miniwax Golden Oak stain to darken it up a bit. Six coats of polyurethane and 2 years later and it looks exactly the same.

We love hardwood floors in our rentals. Most of the older houses in our investment area have some type of hardwood hidden under the ever-present ratty carpet.  Usually, it’s well worth the cost to repair and refinish. The new polyurethane coatings are durable and we’ve yet to have a tenant mess one up.

A few years ago, we bought this beauty– a 3/2/1 with garage apartment near the college. Built in 1939, it had the original glass door knobs, 5 panel doors, pedestal sinks and cool built-ins intact. 

Heavy sigh  :)

The 90+ year old granny-owner fed us gooey cookies.  She patted our hands. She told stories of the home’s history complete with newspaper clippings. Let’s just say, one should be very careful about eating granny-cookies when shopping for real estate. 

Granny insisted that the hardwoods under the carpet were in A-1 shape; we assumed she was probably right considering the condition of the rest of the house. We made a ridiculously high offer, signed papers, wrote large checks and watched granny grab her bingo cards and head off on a cruise.

After taking possession, we learned granny was right. The oak flooring *was* pristine…until some evil person glued the carpet directly to the floor and nailed the entire perimeter. Fortunately, the floor was salvageable (and hideously over-budget) everywhere except the kitchen where the glue combined with years of spills, grease and gunk to form some type of noxious chemistry experiment.

We considered vinyl flooring but it just didn’t seem to fit the character of the house. A friend suggested a new pine floor using off-the-shelf materials available at any hardware store. We were a little skeptical… okay a *lot* of skeptical. Pine equals soft and tenants are notoriously tough on flooring. After much hand waving and many assurances from his bud that dents were just ‘part of the charm’ and thus ‘proof’ that this would make a perfect floor, Mr. Brz decided to give it a try.

Pine is relatively inexpensive in our area (maybe because we live in the Piney Woods of East Texas). Total cost for the floor ended up being around $1.25/sq ft for materials with Mr. Brz and child-units performing all labor. Boards are a combination of 6 and 8″ wide planks. He used a grinder with a sanding disc to bevel the edges, but found it too aggressive. Still, as the pictures show, it looks fantastic. On a later installation in an upstairs room of our home, he used a palm sander just to knock the edge off– a look we prefer. He top-nailed with 2 1/8″ ring-shank nails, setting them slightly using a framing gun and hand-set any that didn’t play nice, then filled the holes with stainable wood filler.

After the boards were down, he went over everything with a belt sander to even it a bit (nothing too aggressive), vacuumed well with a shop vac and tack-ragged carefully (especially in the bevels), then stained with Miniwax golden oak. Four coats of semi-gloss followed by 2 coats of satin polyurethane completed the job.

Another view of the kitchen floor after two years

The kitchen floor is holding up extremely well. It’s possible the rustic character of this type floor camoflauges dents and scratches but we’ve given it a good going over without finding damage.

We liked the result enough to install the same floor in a couple of rooms at home.

Another pine floor during installation in our home. The black roofing felt underneath can be seen in the upper left corner.

Closer look, before stain

Different angle, before stain and poly

All done~

Popularity: 22% [?]

Tags: DIY, do-it-yourself, flooring, pine, pine flooring, wide plank, yellow pine

Flooring is probably one of the trickiest choices in a rental. We’ve switched to hard floors of one type or another in all our units. Carpet isn’t cheap and just looks nasty after a couple of years–even with shampoo, it never looks clean and I *really* don’t like thinking about what’s been ground into those fibers.

We’ve found a contractor who charges $3/sq ft to install ceramic tile. If we can possibly squeeze it into the budget, this is our first choice. The grout gets sealed with Aquamix Grout Colorant–fantastic stuff. Still, occasionally a tile gets broken and has to be replaced which can get expensive. Plus we’ve had a few houses with settling foundations and surprise! ceramic tile cracks right along with the slab. Not a problem if the tile is confined to smaller areas, but a whole-house installation is particularly vulnerable to this misery.

Laminate floors are great They’re durable and scratch resistant but quality is a direct corrolation  to price and around here, we’ve found the tipping point hovers around $4/sq ft for anything that will hold up to tenant abuse. Also, repairing a laminate floor means taking up the whole floor like a giant puzzle and putting the silly thing back together.

Sheet vinyl floors aren’t so bad anymore. We toured (read that, “snuck into” as the silly owners left the doors wide open) a house for sale in an area where most homes have lovely oak flooring under the ratty carpet the owners installed on their 50th birthday. Almost everyone around here is ripping out the carpet and refinishing the oak with one of the newer, polyurethane finishes, ourselves included. We wouldn’t have known this particular floor was sheet vinyl if the installer hadn’t left a scrap on the kitchen counter. (Okay, we *might* have figured it out eventually, but when you’re in stealth mode, you’re usually not crawling about on hands and knees examining  the floors in close detail.)

We’ve used the newer peel and stick vinyl tiles in some of our smaller units and they’ve held up surprisingly well. Even buying the most expensive tile, we’re only talking $1/sq ft and these newer tiles are thicker with better adhesive and wear like thunder. There’s also an important benefit in Tenantville– peel and stick flooring is extremely easy to repair.  Just buy an extra box and if one (or two or three) get gouged beyond bearing, heat with a blow dryer, lift and replace. Cinchy

Still, we’ve only used them in kitchens and bathrooms, places where folks expect square tiles. This photo shows the utility room installation at the Magnolia house.

Our current rehab project needs new flooring throughout, ceramic tile isn’t in the budget and no way I’m putting square peel and stick tiles in the bedrooms and living area. We’ve finally narrowed the choices down to Novalis Vinyl Plank Flooring and a newer product available at Home Depot, Trafficmaster Allure. Both look like wood and come in planks which adds to the illusion.

Novalis Plank Flooring

We first encountered Novalis planks about 3 years ago when we lived in our blue doublewide. At less than $1/sq ft, this seemed like the perfect solution for our aging kitchen/utility room floor. We bought a couple of sample planks and ran our own series of durability tests, which included dog chewing, key scratching and sticking a piece outside on the concrete steps. A year later when a tree smashed the trailer, the sample still looked like new with no lifting, no scratches and no fading. We never got around to using Novalis, but we hung on to the samples just in case. After tons of searching, I can’t find any negative reviews, except for maybe a few hardwood flooring snobs who’ll never love anything but hand-rubbed Brazilian Cherry personally installed  by Bob Villa using only hand tools, forged nails and beeswax.

Here’s a thread over on Garden Web (with pix) from folks who seem happy with their floors:

First room of Novalis vinyl plank done (pic)

Trafficmaster Allure

Last week, a friend told us about a floating vinyl flooring and claimed that wandering gypsies prophesied of its coming to a big box store in our vicinity. After much tromping up and down the Home Depot aisles, we finally found the boxes of Trafficmaster Allure. After a quick perusal, Mr. Brz spent lots of time cartwheeling about the store… something the non-handywoman he married couldn’t quite figure. I mean, a vinyl plank floor is a planked vinyl floor, right?

 Apparently not.

The Allure floor sticks *to itself* rather than the subfloor, hence the acrobatic display. The mister claims this will save him tons of time, if not money. At $2/sq ft, the price is almost double although there will be some savings on floor prep materials. However, after much internet searching, the reviews appear mixed as this entry on the Apartment Therapy blog seems to indicate: Trafficmaster Vinyl Flooring 

And another thread on a Canadian site: House and Home

Mr. Brz seems to think this product is worth a shot, lifting edges and rub marks notwithstanding. Mrs. Brz wants to beat knots on Mr. Brz’s head, but being a gentle soul, will probably opt for commando nagging maneuvers.

 Guess we’ll see… updates to follow asap.

For an update to this article, click here.

Popularity: 100% [?]

Tags: allure, aquamix, flooring, laminate, novalis, peel and stick, plank, trafficmaster, vinyl, wood