Laying Down da Iron

So, as you might have guessed from the title of this post, the next big job in our basement reno once the floors were prepped was laying the floor.

 

I already talked about what types of products we picked and why, they had arrived at the flooring store, so now we just had to lay the darn things!  We started off with the tiles, figuring that the more forgiving nature of tile + grout vs. the planks in regards to imperfections (well at least that's what we guessed), was a good idea for us rookies.  We used the Mannington Adura Elements Manhattan White Iron (yeah, long name eh!) tiles in the 12"x24" format, with a light grey grout (pewter).



In person waay nicer than this pic!
source 

We went with grey grout for a couple of reasons:

1. Hide dirt- the tile is in our downstairs hallway (which leads in from our carport/garden) and our laundry room which is shared with our tenant so probably won't be the cleanest/driest areas
2. We have light grey/greige walls in both rooms
3. We just liked the look better with our tile choice
    

Due to the small square footage of our laundry room we chose to start our adventures in laying floors there. Now, I could lie and tell you that we carefully read the instructions and watched a bunch of YouTube videos.... but ... we didn't, we just listened to the flooring guys, and kinda winged it.  So, I won't go into too much detail about how we did it (but, if you want details just let me know). 



We went with a running bond pattern (aka brick pattern), and after playing around with a few tiles to see if we wanted them running width ways or length ways down the hallway (our hallway is next to the laundry room so we wanted to the two areas to work together)- we chose width ways to make it feel larger- we were ready to kick the flooring party off.  One evening after work, we decided to tackle the laundry and I have to say that this flooring was suuuuper easy to lay. 

From start to finish the laying of the glue and tile was less than 2 hours.   For cutting the tiles to size, and putting down the glue, the only tools we needed were: 

• pencil
• straight edge
• box cutter
• the finest glue spreader available at Rona/Home Depot

The next night I tackled the grouting solo, as it is too small of a space for the two of us to be working in. Lucky for me, the grouting was even easier, taking no more than 1 hour to complete.

 

Laundry room completed!

After living with our laundry room for a few days to make sure we had done the install right ok, we moved onto the hallway, which again was done over two after work evenings.

 

Above is the phase 1 (laying the tile) completed, see how the grout lines kinda jump out at you due to the dark concrete floor underneath?  As a side note, the lovely (can you sense my sarcasm?!) blue doors and trim is stunning no?!! 

 

Below is H in progress of grouting the same hallyway (but looking in the opposite direction down the hall).  In the background you can see the pre-grout look and in the foreground you can see the post grout look, a nice subtle contrast that brings out the grey tones in the flooring.



Three months later, what do we think?!  We still love it, both the look (clean and modern-ish grouted "tile") and feel (tough and easy to clean like tile, but warmer and more flexible so better at handling our slightly imperfect base).  So, it's safe to say both H an I give it a big thumbs up, and have no regrets about not getting a pro in to lay the floor.  We I even have another wee project that I have been thinking about using this product for.