My husband purchased our home in 1998, long before we met, fell in love and wrote our happily ever after. When we met he had this awful blue carpet in the house. He had picked it out and was actually pretty proud of it. Men. I hated it. Hated.It. It was bad.
Fast forward a few years and we got engaged. Once we set a wedding date, the boy, and I moved in. The first project in making his house into our home was to do something about that carpet. I found a great deal on some beautiful 20x20 travertine tiles and convinced him to rip out the carpet and put the tile down. Which brings us to our first mistake. The son of a good friend of ours did tile for a living. He was a good kid (still is, don't get me wrong) and needed the work so we had him install our tile while we were away for a week on our honeymoon.
We came home from our week away to unfinished floors. Granted it was almost 1,000 square feet, but he had a week and still wasn't done. We had even removed all of the old flooring and prepared the concrete slab. All he had to do was lay tile. So he rushed to lay the rest of the tile and really rushed to put down the grout. Hindsight being what it is, we really should have stopped him at that point and have him redo the grout, but we were tired from traveling and just wanted our house back.
The grout held up all of a couple of months before it started crumbling and falling in. In some places, the entire grout line was gone. It was awful and so frustrating. At first we attempted to patch the spots because we thought they were isolated air bubbles. They weren't. The entire grout job was bad and would need to be redone.
We started scraping out grout, by hand. It was a long, tedious process and made worse by the fact that it was preventable and just a lazy, rush move on the part of the installer. Eventually, we gave up on trying to get the rest of the grout out. We kept saying to each other "we really need to redo the grout" but the irritation about the situation and the back breaking work involved just led to that job being put off.
Years passed, and we went on with our daily lives, with grout free floors. It was a pain to vacuum every grout line to get the dirt and dog hair out, and the edges of the tiles started to chip away with daily wear. We started tossing around the idea of hiring someone to do the grout for us, but we were really over the tile at that point. Then my love started mentioning wood floors.
We had originally considered wood when we first did the tile but decided against it, mainly because of our dogs. If it wasn't for the grout issue, I probably would not have replaced the tile. It was nice, easy to clean, looked good and kept the house cooler in the summer. It did have some downsides - mainly the grout and the fact that what kept the house cool in the summer made it impossible to keep warm in the winter. So we started pricing wood flooring.
Right away, we decided that hardwood and engineered were out. While they were very nice, and I found more than one that I loved, they were really out of our price range. We have plans to sell this house and move out of California once our son graduates high school in 2015, so we did not want to invest too much money in flooring that we would only enjoy for two years. That brought us to two options - A) redo the grout or B) laminate.
We choose B) laminate. After a very short search, we settled on this. Charisma Coles Hill Chestnut from Lumber Liquidators. It was a nice color, and in our price range. I would have preferred to get a hand-scraped flooring but maybe in my next house.
Coming soon - Part Two: Bye Bye Tile!
