Its official, I don’t understand people.
I am working on the tiling the kitchen floor in my house which was built in 1939. The thing I don’t understand is that as I rip up the crappy Pergo(t) flooring that was in place, I expect to see the main structural part of the floor. Why do I expect that? Because when I put new flooring down, that is what I do, I remove the old stuff. It just makes sense to me, I don’t put additional clothes on when I want to wear something different. I don’t put new flooring over old flooring.
Anyway, do I find that here, no, I find about one and half inches of layers of materal over the main structural floor with the bottom nice layer being hardwood. So I look around and realize that unless I want to replace all of the cabinetry which the previous owners put in prior to me moving in, I have to leave at least the hardwood because an inch and half drop in the floor is going to impact the cabinetry. SO… I decide to just strip off everything above that, about 3/4 inch of 3 layers of vinyl type tiles as well as a couple of layers of thin luan wood used to level the floor because the previous layers were uneven. This makes no sense to me.
It reminds me of how people apply permissions on files, folders, and Active Directory. When they want something added to it they don’t look at what is there and logically adjust it, they just throw more stuff on top of it until at some point, there is no choice but to go through and rip it all out and start over. I understand lazy, this isn’t about lazy. Lazy is about doing it the the way with the least work over the longest period. This is like short term lazy or maybe it could be better stated as stupid lazy. You have less work in the short term but a buttload more work long term. Maybe the idea is that you will simply move on and you won’t have to deal with it. That just seems foreign to me. I have trouble screwing the future to make my present more enjoyable.
Blah.
It’s so funny that underneath the Pergo was some genuine hardwood. Unless it was in terrible condition, all the previous owners had to do was rip & refinish and they’d have had real hardwood instead of fake… Are you thinking of going with a hardwood floor now that you’ve found it? Hardwood can be quite nice in a kitchen, and refinishing it is probably easier than tiling, which is so easy to mess up.
Yeah I thought the same thing about the pergo vs hardwood. I am going with the tile, I am a tile guy, I really like tile and stone work.
I know that the tile work won’t be perfect, there isn’t a perfect sqare edge not to mention level floor surface in the entire house[1] that wasn’t due to me tearing the entire floor out and building from the joists up (which I have done in several rooms). I would do that with the kitchen except I don’t want to tear out all of the cabinetry to redo it all. I actually like what they did with the cabinets unfortunately. Anyway I know it won’t be perfect but I have been quite happy with the tile work in the house so far which includes
1. Back utility room – ripped out floor and rebuilt
2. Downstairs bathroom floor – ripped out floor and rebuilt, also tiled shower that previously had plastic surround and added two large mirrors into the tile work. Now just trying to find the right timing for replacing the rainx on the mirrors to keep them at max cleanliness.
3. A foyer type area that ties two bedrooms, livingroom, bathroom, and kitchen together. Quite unlevel but unfortunately I couldn’t see a good way to tear it out and refinish without creating odd height changes into the various rooms.
4. Upstairs bathroom. Again ripped out floor and rebuilt from scratch. Also put in 2-person jacuzzi tub that is also tiled (1″x1″ tiles). In that room there aren’t two straight wall type surfaces that are parallel so I got creative with the tile and purposely cut it into odd shapes and sizes and put it into different angles. Anything else that would have been perfectly square would have looked odd depending on what vertical surface you looked at next to it. The jacuzzi tiles I purposely made into a rougher finish as well for the same reason. Nothing looks odder than perfectly straight lines next focus points that aren’t parallel with them.
[1] House was built in 1939 on pier and post foundation which I had replaced with a concrete foundation with steel I-beams supporting the underside of the house and replaced all of the joists all through the underside. My biggest complaints with the house are that it is really too small for me now (about 1800 sq ft) and doesn’t have a basement. I have been thinking for some time about moving though instead I may build. I could visualize 3000-4000 sq ft on a basement (or possibly dual level basements) with either concrete or the special thick foam board style construction, steel roof, and with heavy use of air flow and passive solar for maintaining ambient temperature. I visualize it on 10+ wooded acres. 🙂