Peel, Stick, Repeat: Vinyl Floor Tile Adventures

Crap. Crap.

The tile we picked up from Lowe's to re-do the sewing room floor at my mom's other house, the tile that we thought matched exactly the tile she already had in the rest of her downstairs rooms, doesn't match at all. Not at all.

Under the florescent glow of overhead lights at Lowe's, they looked the same. A perfect match. Even the Lowe's guy said so.

Mom already had three full boxes of Italia Stone tile left over from tiling her kitchen, hall, and downstairs bathroom, and we figured we would need only four more boxes of tile to complete the sewing room. Only the manufacturer, Cryntel, had fazed out the Italia Stone, replacing it instead with their new line of EuroStone tile. But the patterns looked the same. We would all swear to it. I just assumed Cryntel was remarketing their old product in pretty blue packaging with an obviously hipper name.

But back at my mom's house, under her lights, the tile didn't match at all. The new stuff is more bluish-greenish. Hmmm. Although it didn't match the old tile, it did nicely compliment the unplanned for mint-green wall.

Weird.

But now what?

The top half of the photo shows the Cryntel Italia Stone tile in the hallway. Below the wood-like transition piece I still need to install because the floors are not level, I have the old and new tile laid out together. Can you tell the difference between the two?

Our choices were this: We could go back to Lowe's and pick up enough of the new EuroStone to complete the room, or we could return the new tile and search online and see if anyone was clearancing the Italia Stone. But after checking the Lowe's web site and elsewhere, it was clear we weren't getting any more Italia Stone tile without driving to 42 different places. Lowe's didn't even carry the product number anymore. The new EuroStone, no problem. Every Lowe's in the Chicagoland area was fully stocked with the new product.

"We could blend the old tile with the new," I suggested, still hoping to save a few bucks by using what we already had. "You know, scatter them in so it makes a patchwork." My mom the quilter just gave me The Look, indicating what a stupid idea that was. Ted shot it down pretty quick, too.

Stubbornly, to prove it did not look stupid, I arranged several of the old and new tiles out on the floor.

Crap. Crap.


The new tile has a beveled edge. Well why didn't they say that on the package--?

Oh.

"Fine, new tile it is."

When I started to lay out the EuroStone vinyl tile, I was soooo careful, paranoid that just one set slightly off would ruin the whole floor. But by the second box, I was ripping off the backing paper, tossing it over my shoulder, and nearly flinging the tiles in place. The job is not as scary as it looks.

What is scary is this:


Does this really happen often enough, people sliding across the floor and injuring themselves, risking life and limb to tile a floor, that they actually need to put a danger label on the paper, telling you to throw it away?

At any rate, I got the job done without too much stress. Most instructions online advocated using an exacto blade to cut the tiles; those are all packed, so I used a cheap-o pair of scissors to cut them to size for the closet and along the edges. While the scissors didn't exactly cut through like butter, it was not a problem and I got the floor laid out in an afternoon. Or what would have been an afternoon if I didn't spread it out across three days. I can now happily check "lay vinyl floor tile" off my Bucket List.

Here is the final result, with our carefully staged furniture.

Why only two chairs? To make the room look larger, of course! Actually, I have no idea what happened to the fourth one; the third one broke when I sat down on it. Seriously. I'm no wee skinny thing, but all I did was sit on the damn thing. Definitely time to get to the gym.

Look how nicely the unplanned for mint-green paint matches the window blinds. The bowl on the table is one my grandmother brought back with her from Finland when she took her mother to visit with family in Helsinki. Great Grandma Marta (Aiti to those who loved her) emigrated to the United States, alone, when she was only seventeen.

The room looks fabulous now, doesn't it? Surely, someone will make an offer on my mom's house now. Everyone think positive thoughts!

Meanwhile, Back at the Ranch...

er...two-story, four-bedroom Tudor Revival, that is.

If Mom hasn't shown up in the blog much the last two weeks, it isn't because she's slacking. Okay, she's slacking on her Box House duties (just kidding, Mom), but that's because she's been working hard on a few updates at her other house, which is now on the market.

For thirty plus years, this was her sewing room:

Actually, I can't find a single picture of it. How is this possible? For thirty years this room was the epicenter of her creativity, where she made her quilts, her stuffed animals and dolls, and the occasional item of clothing for me or my brother (I was the only kid on the block with Holly Hobby jeans. Those were good jeans). What you'll have to picture for yourself is a room cobbled together with mis-matched, second-hand furniture; cabinets; boxes stacked floor-to-ceiling with fabrics or sewing books; and an assortment of finished and half-finished and with-luck-she'll-one-day-get-a-chance-to-finish-it projects.

Three months ago, she began, with a mixture of excitement and bittersweet memories, to pack up the room in anticipation of the move. Unfortunately, there was no room to put the boxes, and so the packed boxes stayed where they were, in the center of the room, obscuring the qualities of late afternoon sunlight streaming through the window and the fact that this downstairs room could be a terrific office, sitting room, or even a fifth bedroom, as it has a closet--a rare find in these suburban-style homes. But all people could see were boxes and more boxes.

Mom's waving through what used to be a wall; shortly after Mom and Dad bought the house, they walled off this opening with two-by-fours and paneling to create her sewing room. The room was entered from the hall to the left (not visible in the photo). A few months ago, she took the wall out to open up the space to the living room. Any future owners have the option of closing off the space again.

Little by little, the boxes filled with fabric and mementos made their way to The Box House, but what their removal revealed was a well-worn vinyl floor, lifting in places and showing the sub floor in other spots. This was even more detracting to the potential buyer than the piles of boxes were.

Biting the bullet, we went to Lowe's in search of replacement vinyl tile. Having watched far more episodes of Curb Appeal, From Junky to Funky, Desperate Landscapes, and other DIY Network shows than is probably healthy, we knew that investing a few hundred bucks in re-doing this room would equal multiple offers on the house in an otherwise tough market. (At least, that's the plan.)

We got distracted by some of the other offerings at Lowe's--gotta get me that red washer and dryer--but we eventually found tile that is a match to what she already has in her kitchen. I think it's really the same stuff in a different package, and at 88 cents a tile on sale, it's a bargain to boot:

Mom rolled up and removed the last fragment of 1970s peach-colored rug that was left in the house; it had been at the bottom of the sewing room's closet.

Pulling up the old tile began in a deceptively easy fashion. The glue had long since lost its powerful hold and all we had to do was lift 'em right up and stack 'em in a pile. We were laughing at the ease of it, high-fiving and congratulating ourselves on what would be a fast makeover. The ones in the center of the room, however, must have been glued down by Satan himself. Right where Mom's sewing chair rolled back and forth over the decades, the tiles had melded together with the wood so that they were now one entity. Pulling them up (I'm not having as much fun as this picture demonstrates) was rough, especially when all I was using was a small, bent-angle scrapper. (The bulk of the tools are packed in boxes at The Box House.)

It took 20 minutes to pull up nine tiles, and a few splinters of subfloor came up with them.

Hi ho, hi ho, it was back to Lowe's we did go. This time, we picked up some floor filler and leveling compound to take care of the rough spots. While I was supposed to be working on that, Mom painted the room with a fresh coat of cream-colored paint. (I slacked; having rented the first disc of last season's Lost, Ted and I watched that instead. We're always a year behind on shows.)

Well, Mom painted three walls of the room cream before she ran out of paint. The final can from Home Depot was not the creamy magnolia goodness we were expecting, but mint green. An odd mistake, and one we were surprised we didn't notice. But what's more strange is that it is the exact shade of the fabric blinds in her room. So, mint green the fourth wall is; it looks good, and don't believe anyone who says we didn't plan it that way from the start.

With the walls freshly painted, the floors cleaned and prepped with a skim coat, and a new chalkline snapped, we laid out the tile:

Or that was the plan for today, at any rate. The floor is still naked to the subfloor. The realtor called to say she was bringing over a potential buyer to look at the house. So instead of prepping, snapping, and laying, we piled all our boxes, paint, and flooring supplies in the middle of the room and went out to the hell that is the mall on a Sunday so they could look at the house. Humph. How frustrating to have people look at the house when you're trying to get it ready to sell.