What Lies Beneath

With the painting done, our next big task is flooring. My first thought was that we’d go get some wood and tile and be laying it down within a week. Turns out there’s a lot of work that must be done before even touching the final flooring material.

After a hefty amount of research and numerous visits to flooring stores in the area (turns out that the nearby city of Dalton, GA, is not only known for topping the list of least educated cities in the country, but also for housing many of the nation’s leading flooring manufacturers), we decided on a combination of tile and wood. Anywhere that the floor is being placed on the concrete slab – plus the master bathroom – would be tiled. Hard wood would be installed on all the wood subfloors, namely the living room, the master bedroom, and all the stairs.

Before we could even consider doing any sort of flooring, the first step was to thoroughly clean the floors to allow the mortar to adhere properly (we quickly regretted our mindset of not putting tarps down while painting since they “aren’t the finished floors”). Our first miserable attempt involved shovels and pieces of sandpaper. Hours of backbreaking labor yielded about 30 square feet of a slightly cleaner – but not clean enough – concrete slab.

We initially tried to clean the floors with shovels and handheld sandpaper

We rented a power sander from Home Depot and immediately breathed a sigh of relief. The sander could do more in five seconds than we could do in an hour, and it made quick work of cleaning our floors. There were a few areas where our wood sub-floor was so uneven that we had to sand off as much as a quarter inch of wood, and we spent the bulk of our time with the sander trying to make these areas level. By the end of our two day rental, we had logged 26 hours of use on the tool, and we were exhausted.

John using the power sander on the wood subfloor

With the subfloors ready, it was time to start installing the uncoupling membrane that would go under our tile floors. The purpose of the membrane is to reduce cracking by absorbing the stresses created when the substrate beneath it moves. We initially scoffed when we read about the estimated labor cost for installing the Ditra membrane, only to quickly realize that it was hard work. We had to mix, spread, and comb mortar with a notched trowel across each portion of the floor. The Ditra pieces were then cut to fit the area and placed on top of the mortar. From there, every square inch of the Ditra had to be properly embedded to ensure there was proper mortar coverage and get rid of any air bubbles and excess mortar. John re-purposed our furniture dolly to work as a giant roller, which was a godsend, because using the grout float to embed the material by hand (still necessary near walls) was exhausting.

John using a notched trowel to spread the mortar where we’ll be placing another piece of the orange uncoupling membrane

John’s makeshift dolly/roller used to level the uncoupling membrane and ensure proper coverage

I think we should stick with orange floors and pink trim…

We’ve now started laying tile and are quickly regretting our decision to tile more than 1,000 square feet. It’s a lot of work…