Month: July 2015

Categories
Home Remodeling

The grand design emerges

Kitchen floor in orange
The shape of the new space emerges

The flooring crew is working Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, and Monday. They set the Schluter DITRA decoupling membrane and new wood flooring on Wednesday. On Thursday the tile crew is planning the layout and cutting tile as needed. On Friday, they’ll mix thin set mortar and actually lay the tile. On Monday, they’ll return to grout the tile.

Kitchen floor in orange
The shape of the new space emerges

The orange area is the DITRA membrane. The label at the utility closet corner and the label at the right door jamb fall pretty close to the cabinet lines allowing visualization of the kitchen work area.

Adrian Tile and Wood Flooring

http://www.adriantilehardwood.com/home.html

Adrian Tile is doing the flooring work for this project. They have a good reputation in the community and are able to work in both wood and tile which made the planning of the wood to tile interface easy. The wood crew and the tile crew are young but know their craft. My project manager, Evan Kittrel, and the craftsmen reviewed the drawings and planned all of the boarders at the start of work. The crew fit the Schluter DITRA membrane, and worked the new wood in with the old in a very professional manner.

No job is simple!

Although it appears easy, this job threw a curve or two at the installers. The plan is to put T-molding at the joints between tile and wood and this required some thought. Where should the visible tile-wood joints be? The idea is to have a butt joint between the T-moding and cabinet trim. This means wood under the cabinets just a bit at the lounge end of the kitchen.

The second tricky bit was to locate the peninsula wood to tile joint under the cabinet but at a point where the down draft hood vent could be cut through the wood.This worked out to the location you see in the photol

And no old house is ever on the level. There is a bit of a low spot at the outside corner to the right. The plan is to use a bit extra thin set there to level the floor but it is something we can’t calculate so Evan scored an additional bag of thin set mix to allow for the unpredictable extra.

Tile laid without mortar
Trial Dry Lay

Extending the wood into the kitchen requires following the original staggering of planks.

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Weaving the new wood into the old. This technique makes the floor strong and attractive by staggering the plank to plank end joints in a stepped fashion.

Life during the job

The crew has also been a hit with the dogs and have been good at briefing me on the things I needed to know to keep their work pristine while the job is in progress. We’ll be without the tile area Thursday, Friday, and Saturday. On Thursday, the tile will be dry placed on the slightly warped floor. In this condition, it is not completely supported and subject to bending loads from walking. The dogs and I have to stay off during this period of storage in place. On Friday, the tile will be set but the mortar remains squishy for 12 hours of so. The crew recommends that we stay off until Sunday morning to ensure that the mortar has cured without shifting a tile out of plane or disturbing the grout joints by catching a nail and dragging a tile. On Monday, we’ll need to stay off again to allow the grout to cure without nail marks.

Categories
Home Remodeling

Upstaged by a Houndy

Sam’s BellaBob has been putting me to shame with her regular posts. I’ve been slacking off but not for want of things to write about. In early July I took a road trip to visit the Watson Cousins Reunion and the remodel project has been gathering momentum. Since I last wrote, plaster has happened, painting has begun with the new plaster, walls, and ceiling painted, there is a stack of flooring out of the frame and tile in the garage.

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Picking Materials

One of the challenges of remodeling is all of the decorating choices you must make without much in the way of a frame of reference. These choices, once made, can last the life of the structure and changing one’s mind is costly. This includes granite and tile for my project. I’ve written about visiting the stone yard and visiting the tile shops. Well, I finally made up my mind.

Granite

The winner is Saint Cecilia Light. Specifically, the stone below and the one behind it from Marva which has the best display of sensibly priced granite in Tidewater.

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Tile

The winning floor tile is Roca Versailles Noce 12×24 (actually modular metric equivalent). This tile harmonizes with the cabinets and countertop. The base color is beige with brown, green, grey, and other colors in a faux travertine pattern. This is a HD printed pattern so it is likely that there won’t be two tiles alike in the floor. I’ve told the dogs that this tile is pre-tracked so they won’t be able to mess it up.

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The winning backsplash tile is Crossfield White Plains 3×6 loose tile shown on the left. The granite below is an example of St Cecelia Light that is much lighter than my material. Same tones, just more white feldspar in the stone. This tile is porcelain HD printed with a light pattern that should echo the colors in the granite.

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Categories
Home Remodeling

Visiting Tile Shops

In a large metropolitan area, such as the Virginia Tidewater, there are a number of tile stores, some manufacturer specific and some representing several manufacturers. You’d think tile shopping would be simple but it is not.

Home Depot and Loews

They have about everything including tile. The thing to watch about the big box stores is that they may have tile from multiple manufacturing batches on the shelf. Colors can vary from batch to batch so if you buy from them, buy only unopened boxes and check that each box is from the same production lot.

The Local Stores

Florida Tile and Dal Tile (a Mohawk company) have local brand stores in the 757. The Florida store is the nicer of the two with attractive displays and attention to light color quality in the store. Both are frustrating because they organize the tiles by marketing series rather than in some useful way.

We also have Morris Tile, Mosaic Tile, and Triton Stone, two independent tile distributors and a stone yard that sell to the trade and to DIY. These shops carry tiles from multiple manufacturers but are very different in their approach to curating what they offer. Mosaic Tile is the shop that gets it right. What Mosaic does that the others don’t is to curate the tiles by look and color. For example, all the beige faux stone tiles are together. And the beige wood look and beige solid color, and beige granite, marble, and travertine stone tiles are together. It’s genius. So obvious but, in the 757, only Mosaic does it.

And for my project the winner is Mosaic

Mosaic where I made my selections. That said, my contractor hires the tile installer and the installer or contractor actually buys material. Both my builder and a retired kitchen designer friend suggested Mosaic and I’m glad I made the trip. Their shop is newly moved to former Hanger 9 flight simulator arcade near Lynnhaven Blvd in Virginia Beach. Mosaic remodeled this old warehouse building near Barrett Auctions to have a spacious layout that is greyhound friendly and allowed me to bring Missy and Nick in. The perimeter of the store has a number of example kitchen and bath installations that you can use for inspiration. The receptionist explained the store organization and turned us loose to browse.

It was easy to find the look i desired and the colors I was after. I was able to find a nice creamy faux travertine that would harmonize nicely with cherry finished maple cabinets and the likely granite contenders. Once I found what I was looking for, they made a record of my preferences, let me check out a sample, and sent me on my way with a data sheet that my installer could use to select the materials he needed to do the installation.

At the other shops it was hard to find the Goldie Locks tile, the one with enough color and pattern to be interesting but not boring and not shouty. What Mosaic did was to split each manufacturer series by dominant color so the gray one would be with the grays, the green one with the greens, and the brown one with the browns. The effect of this is to group a slice of the color wheel by look making it easy to find that Goldie Locks pattern.

Mosaic’s Sample Policy

One unusual thing Mosaic does is to take a $10 deposit for each sample that will be refunded when the sample is returned. They really want their samples back. But they make it easy by attaching a printed label to each sample identifying the specific material and listing the related sizes and colors. This label clearly identifies the sample as a Mosaic sample so you can take it back to the proper shop.

The samples are usually of one of the mosaic sheets from the pattern and color. Mosaic mounted these to Masonite to protect them from damage and attached the label to the underside of the backer. The mounted sheets are easy to handle and give a more representative idea of the colors and patterns than is seen in a field tile from modern HDP printed patterns. Modern patterns are designed to cover 10×20 feet without repeats. Because they are mosaic sheets made by cutting and mounting bits of field tiles, the samples are several times the cost of a field tile. It is one thing to give away a $1 field tile and another to give away a $10 mosaic sheet.

I’ve got a collection of several samples from the other shops and I can’t remember what came from where to return them. But I have no skin in the game so they probably won’t go back. And to find related items, I have to go back to the website or PDF catalog.

Again genius and so simple and so obvious a practice you’d think it would be common across the industry.