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.

Flat not Level

With the walls done and the flooring ordered, it was time to prep the floors.  There were a few different issues to deal with when it came to our floors:

1. Old asbestos tiles in the hallways, bedroom, and bathroom
2. Cracked and peeling sheet linoleum in the ex-laundry “room”
3. A random drain in the laundry
4. Areas where the pro’s had to cut through raised foundations (new bedroom and laundry (doorways)
5. Slope into the living room

All of the above lead to uneven floors.  Part of the attraction to the floors we picked was that they were flexible and therefore could conform to minor imperfections in the floor, but they aren't magical, so we still needed to do some work on our floors to get them ready.
After discussing with the guys in the flooring store, we determined that the floors needed to be ‘flat not level” aka, a marble may slowly roll across a room to a low corner, but the floor had to be smooth with minimal lumps and bumps.

Old asbestos tiles prepped and ready to skim coat and the living room slope at the doorway

So, with our flooring guys we came up with a plan:

1. Old asbestos tiles
• leave and cover with new concrete .  Due to the asbestos and super strong glue they’d used getting them up would be very expensive
2. Cracked and peeling sheet linoleum
• We would take care of the removal
3. A random drain in the old laundry space which was no longer needed
• Cover and remove the slope with self-leveling concrete- which would also seal it
4. Areas where the pro’s had to cut through raised foundations
• Self-leveling concrete
5. Slope into the living room
• Some feathering out with a skim coat to reduce the slope's angle and make it less obvious

removing old laundry lino

So, it was a combination of floor leveling compound in the really dippy places (like by the “laundry” drain and former raised foundation), and thin concrete “feathering” for all the less pronounced dips.  We decided that this step was better left to the pro’s so we paid them to do it.  The whole process was a bit of a saga with me having to pull the “I want your boss to see this” card because they tried to take us for a bit of a ride, but in the end we got things sorted out.

On day 1 of the floor "flattening" our flooring guy asked what our plan was for the old drain... a quick call to our contractor later determined that the drain was not necessary and we could cover over it (a round of high fives and fist pumps - and weird looks from our flooring guy!- may have occurred).  A little on the fly imaginative problem solving later and our flooring guy was ready to even out the whole sloped section of the floor. 

Our high tech drain cover

What the heck is that you ask....  why yes it is a jar lid covered in waterproof tape!  Yup, we so did that!!  It isn't fancy, but it did the trick, they do say that necessity is the mother of all inventions after all.  Hmmmm, I wonder if we should look into patenting our solution?!

With the “flattening” done, all that was left was for the flooring to dry and cure and then we could tackle the flooring install. Unfortunately it was in the middle of the winter, and we had to get the temperature in our, at the time, unheated basement above 20 deg C ….. Ummm, yeah small problem there when the temperatures were around 0 deg C.  Luckily thanks to my company’s old poorly heated temporary accommodation during a recent office reno (sigh, the joys for working for a small tech company...), I had access to several small space heaters, so we hooked those babies up and a week and a half the floor was cured and we were ready to roll.