Summer of mayhem…

Well I’ve been saying for so long that we needed to replace our flooring and we’ve gone and done it at last! We haven’t just replaced the first floor of our flat either, we took the plunge and decided to do the upstairs at the same time! There were moments leading up to the start of the work when I thought what the hell have we signed up for!

We had been looking for the ideal floor for a few years, we’d considered engineered wood flooring, real wood flooring, resin, microscreed and polished concrete. There were negatives with all of them especially the resin, microscreed and polished concrete because we live on the top three floors of an apartment block and the cost implications were huge plus the added cost of getting the materials up all of the stairs (we don’t have a lift!). Then by chance we spotted a very large floor tile on an Australian interiors show called The Block. I started digging around the internet straight away to see who the manufacturer was and if they were available in the UK. Low and behold we had bought tiles from the same company before for our kitchen and bathroom floors! I phoned our local independent tile warehouse Glamorgan Tiles and yes they were able to ship them from Italy! We were on the floor of cloud nine.

The tiles are porcelain and are made to look like concrete and very convincing they are too. They’re also heavy and very large measuring 60 x 120 cm! They are made by an Italian company called Viva Ceramica and as I said we already had their tiles in our kitchen and bathroom so we knew the quality was very good. They’re certainly not cheap but we did get a very handsome discount. Unfortunately we did have a lot of tiles that had chipped corners and couldn’t be used and on top of that the Italian factory closed down for two weeks for the annual holiday. The tilers had finished upstairs and the lounge, hallway and bathroom downstairs but we were left with a half finished floor in the kitchen and dining area. It was a very frustrating and long four weeks waiting for the replacement tiles to arrive and the tilers to be able to fit us in to finish the job.

The tiling company we used are a local company called RDL Tiling Services, they will travel all over the UK so if you need someone I would highly recommend them. The job they’ve done for us is superb and I think you all know how picky I am!

It took four men most of the day to bring up 132sq metres of tiles, countless bags of adhesive and grout etc up to our flat on the third floor.

Ironically our flat more or less looked finished before I ripped up the laminate flooring. We had a few problems to solve including where the wall used to be which we removed about six years ago. Nothing a bit of self levelling compound can’t solve though.

We had to move out for a week but luckily for David he was away with work for most of it. I did spend a few nights on my own on a mattress amongst the devastation of the flat.

It’s so nice to be rid of the laminate that I put down twelve years ago and now have uniform floors throughout. Yes it was madness, complete mayhem at times and a long hard slog but it was most definitely worth it.

Oh, did I mention that we also decided to add the ripping out and re-tiling of our en-suite to the job? We were going to be replacing the floor in there so we thought we may as well…then we decided to replace the shower, the taps, the washbasin…lot’s more pics coming soon…