We haven’t really done a lot of big projects on the house in a while, but we had to do an unplanned one. It’s been almost 5 years since we moved into our house – I cannot believe it has been that long!

When we did the kitchen, we installed cork flooring that was a floating floor. It had a sealant on it and we were a little concerned about it holding up, but went ahead anyway. I loved how it looked and it was warm to walk on in the mornings and not really soft, but not hard like porcelain. This winter we started noticing some creaky noises on the floor. It turns out that water got under the floor from underneath our recycling cabinet and it was swelling the flooring. Plus, the finish was starting to come up on it leaving lighter colored areas. Sigh.

I was thinking of doing a premium vinyl tile that looked like wood. John didn’t want vinyl, but a tiled floor. So the compromise was a porcelain tile that looked like wood. These are 2 foot long tiles in strips to mimic wood.

We stripped out the old floor and spent the weekend putting in the new. We used a premixed tile mastic – not a brand we had used before (mistake). It was a little tricky laying this tile. Okay – it’s a lot tricky because with the staggering, you don’t have four corners to make sure you are staying aligned all the way down the line.

We were really happy with how it looked. Ungrouted, thank goodness.

We needed to wait to grout for the mastic to dry, plus just having time to do the grouting. It’s a good thing because the next couple of days, we noticed loose tiles. Lifted those up and the mastic wasn’t dry. I don’t know what the problem was, but they just weren’t drying. We tried again to put them back down, but they didn’t stay. Saying we were frustrated would really be an understatement here. I sat and thought about all the options, but the renovator in me knew that the only recourse was to pull them all up, scrape the floor and try again.

This time, I got the dry mastic mix made specifically for long porcelain tiles. Then we spent another weekend relaying all those tiles and trying to get them in exactly the same spots since we had all the tiles cut to fit around corners and radiators, etc.

Halfway done and Pixie says “Why are you not finished yet? My food bowl has been in the wrong spot for 2 weeks now”.

It ended up pretty close with a bit of fudging. We gingerly walked on the tiles for a couple of days worried the same thing would happen again, but this stuff did it’s job. Now we are back to a floor looking like this again:

LOL. It’s almost funny, but not really. We grouted where the fridge sits so that we could get that back in place. We’ll pull out the stove and do that at a later date – along with the rest of the floor. That was extremely frustrating. I’ve tiled so many projects (floors, walls, countertops, fireplace) over the years and have never had a problem like this. I think that brand of premixed stuff was just no good. Lesson learned. Boy was the lesson learned. The tile looks really nice, though. This should stay put for 20 years. I’m certainly not doing it again! I’ll post a picture once we get it grouted – probably next year at this rate…