Advice/tips on re-tiling a kitchen floor...
I seem to have volunteered myself into helping a friend install new resilient tile in her upstate townhouse (kitchen) this weekend. I'm reasonably handy but three sub-issues have me head-scratching...
The previous floor and tile was scrapped because water leaked into it somehow... under/between the tiles, into the subfloor, which warped and bent, causing the tiles above to shift and pop out. After that experience with professional installers (reno a few years ago) she decided to do the replacement herself this time. I'm coming in late, after the floor is done but before the tiling.
The old water-ruined floor was ripped out, and the new floor has been built on top of the joists. (Two layers of 3/4 inch plywood plus a 1/4 super-smooth prefab underlay on top). I checked it out this past weekend, and the new flooring seems very smooth, solid and stable to me (no bouncing, no squeaking, no movement at all from what I can tell by walking/jumping on it), maybe because she used about six million screws to hold it down. She's busy this week using wood-filler to fill all the screw holes so it's a uniform smooth surface before tiling.
The tiles she already bought are resilient vinyl of the adhesive-backed kind (peel off paper backing, apply tile). They're thicker than I thought vinyl tile would be (I can bend them, barely, but they're very solid), and even textured like stone. Fancy. They're to be spaced like ceramic tile, with 1/4-inch grout, and she has bought some premixed grout for that (it's the consistency of sandy peanut butter, yum).
The instructions ask for no special pre-treatment to the floor other than a fresh layer of paint-primer, which I suppose improves adhesion. But the Lowe's person she bought them from "strongly" recommended also applying a few brush-strokes of floor adhesive to the (primed) floor beneath as she worked, so she bought a quart of that too.
That's the backstory and state of the project. Three questions...
(1) I dripped some water on the underlay and noticed that it beaded and stayed that way for hours, so clearly the underlay has some sort of water-resistance already. But is any additional waterproofing needed (varathane?) or will the resilient tile plus adhesive be waterproof enough? Obviously, she's paranoid about a re-occurance of the water-seeping-in damage in the future, and one should be able to spill water on a kitchen floor without worry, I think?
(2) I understand how to "start from the middle and work out" when tiling, because I've done some garden work with paving stones before, and I'm pretty good at these geometry puzzles... but here's a question that I can't settle in my own head: should she tile the entire floor, including underneath where the "built-in" kitchen cabinets will be (re)installed later, or just tile up to that point, and replace the cabinets on their bases screwed directly into the wood floor? (The cabinets had to be torn out to re-floor, so they're sitting in her dining room now.)
(3) Again on the water worry: is there any super-coating or special treatment that can or should be applied to the finished floor, on top of the tiles and grout? The tile, grout and adhesive instructions don't mention this either way. Teflon coating? Wax? What?
I have read a few things like
this but they haven't helped me with these two questions.
Any other tips that will make me seem floor-tile smart when I return next weekend will also be appreciated. :)
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That includes just priming the floor for adhesion per the instructions; don't go with any further waterproofing. It's the tile surface that needs to be waterproof. If water gets under the tiles, having additional waterproofing under them is not going to help you much; you'd just have a layer of moisture under your floor that would stay there and breed mold. Concentrate on being sure the top surface of the floor is totally water resistant.
Don't tile under the cabinets.
posted by beagle at 11:30 AM on September 2, 2008