Cost Effective Renovations For Your Home: Flooring

Do you have old vinyl flooring that looks dated or just isn’t what you want in your home anymore? Perhaps you have some carpet that is in such rough shape that you want to rip it up but don’t want to spend a lot of money on ceramic or stone tile flooring. Solution: Look to trafficMaster solid vinyl floor tiles!

My mum has wanted to slowly change the rooms in her house to give them a new, revitalized fresh look but did not want to spend a ton of money laying tile down. She was introduced to vinyl tiles. They can be up to 5 times more resilient than regular tile and since they are non-porous will resist staining better over time.

But Vinyl is dated and looks horrible!

That is not true! These tiles that my mom picked up look great and resemble real stone tiles! Not only that they are easy to lay down too.

Installation:

Note: I am not a licensed contractor and this is my first time laying this vinyl tiling and these are my own thoughts! Feel free to correct me on any mistakes.

Hopefully your floor is relatively flat to begin with. If you have existing vinyl flooring you can use that as a base to start on top of. Though I am sure contractors and seasoned tilers (my namesake right?) will complain about not taking up the vinyl flooring to begin with and/or making sure the floor is flat and true.

People will carpet will most likely want to rip I it up as well as the carpet underlay as well to lay the tiles on the subfloor. Remember that pulling up the carpet and underlay may be lower than the rest of the surrounding area when you lay the tile. If that is the case you’ll probably want to bump up the height of the subfloor.

The tiling that my mums choose was a nice light stone look tile by trafficMaster. We first laid out the tile on the floor to see which way she wanted to lay it. We tried laying it out side-by-side and then tried staggering the tiles. We went with side-by-side.

All you need to do is peel the paper off the back of the tile and ‘stick’ it to the floor! We used ¾ tile spacers to space out the tiles which also helped us keep the tiles going in a straight line. Pretty simple huh? No having to worry about play with tiling mud!

Ok with regular tiles (ceramic etc) when you need to do a cut because a tile doesn’t fit you would either use a tile saw or tile cutter and chip away at the tile. Well with the vinyl tile it is a lot easier to cut weird shapes with just a utility knife! No needing to rent one of those diamond bladed tile cutters and getting all messy! Just draw on the tile with a pencil, and cut! You can even just score the tile (like with real tile) and snap it off if you’re just changing the size of the tile with no weird intricate shapes.

After the vinyl tiling is stuck down you have the option to grout. It’s weird that they give you that option because it just does not look finished without the grout! So we picked up grout (you can get special stain-resistant vinyl grout), mixed it up and put it on! Making sure we didn’t cover the entire tiles in grout (clean up is easier that way) we put it down and let it cure.

My mum also had the baseboards redone and installed a couple days later and she has me replace all the old looking receptacles and light switches with white Decora ones. Small details can help quite a bit to help transform the look and feel of a room.

I am quite pleased with my first experience with vinyl tiles. They installation was easy and hassle free and I think it looks great. It is a great improvement over the blue and white vinyl flooring that was there previously.