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cimorene- We bought a floating click-tile linoleum floor for the kitchen for good reason - its air permeability vs plastics - but without fully discussing with our contractor and understanding that air permeability was never possible because there's a potential-asbestos layer on our floor that had to be safely contained (or removed, but that would have cost like 10x as much and maybe meant waiting a year or god knows how long, because it's different subcontractors who are even less available and getting subcontractors in Pargas is unobtainium). One of the biggest causes of failure in our house type - completely wooden, handmade by returning WW2 soldier and his tablesaw, engineered for natural air circulation via central chimney with no mechanical aid - is water damage from plastic materials that trap water. Linoleum is a great long-lasting natural material that, unlike plastics, doesn't offgas and destroy the indoor air quality! (Other natural materials are fine too, but wood and ceramic tile were not attractive kitchen floor options. I mean not unless there had been a beautiful wood floor waiting to be buffed up underneath, but there wasn't, just a plank subfloor with big gaps.) Because floating floors have to be flat - any hollows, bumps and dips cause the tiles to separate at the seams over time - and because it was cheaper to encapsulate the dangerous floor safely rather than wait years for it to be safely removed - it had to be covered in poured leveling cement, and cement can't be in direct contact with the cork back of a linoleum click-tile floating floor because it wicks water so well, so there's an industrial plastic vapor barrier underneath it.
So ultimately there's still just as much plastic there as in a sheet vinyl floor, but also the kitchen floor is like an inch higher than the surrounding rooms and cost 4x as much time and money as the nearly-identical-looking sheet vinyl would've done. And due to our determination to install the linoleum ourselves, there's a ton of little spots around the edges of the room where the baseboards can't adequately cover the gap and they're horrible dust collectors, and we have a huge problem because the plastic toekicks for our Ikea kitchen cabinets don't fit properly over the floor and we're going to have to fix this somehow with like... carpentry and ingenuity, but without expert skills and power tools. (It's nearly impossible to hire a carpenter in our town so we've given up even thinking about managing it again.) - We painstakingly priced out kitchen cabinets and thought we could save like... I can't remember now, 300-500€ by buying them from Ikea and carting them off to install ourselves, vs. by ordering them from the kitchen store where Wax's mom ordered hers and having them delivered and installed by the pros. But actually, so much went wrong that we ultimately lost money. Ordering the butcher block separately, ordering it CUT separately, finding the carpenter baffled by the actions of the home store cutter people, the butcher block not actually fully sealed so there's a Crumb Gap that dribbles crumbs into our corner cabinet, the sink counter not going back to the wall because it's somehow sized without standard allowances even though it's supposedly designed and sized for standard size cabinets. We ordered the sink and the butcher block separately from the counter; at the kitchen store you just pick all of that stuff from them. We spent sooooo long on putting those stupid cabinets together, and ultimately, the pull out drawers refused to ever straighten out. I mean, it's an old house so the floor and wall aren't level, sure, but the drawers are ridiculous? Someone should've just told us we could save all that trouble by putting doors in with pull-out shelves or drawers behind them. Also the abovementioned floor mishap, where the Ikea toekicks don't fit because the floating floor is like 3 mm thick, but you're not supposed to put the cabinets in on top of floating floor - like with the floor under the feet, which would have made the height to the toekick correct. They do LOOK great, by the way, that's not the problem. But they're also a lot flimsier quality than the ones Wax's mom ordered from the kitchen store.
- We thought we'd just get around to installing the floating floor in the entry hall ourselves and waved goodbye cheerfully to the contractors. Then later we realized that would mean cutting the tiles to go around the base of the stairs where they touch the floor. So that's not happening. We're gonna have to hire some handymen to do it. There are no baseboards or trim in our entry hall because they go on top of the floor that isn't installed, and we would have to empty the hallway in order to hire the handymen to install the floor.
- We ripped up the vinyl sheet floor upstairs ourselves. What we found under it was big squares of cardboard nailed down, but we didn't realize that. We thought it was just a particleboard subfloor, and ordered enough cork flooring to install ourselves over both rooms. Only after getting a ton of cork floors and installing them over the cardboard in the bedroom did we realize. We pulled up the cardboard in Wax's WFH library/office and discovered painted wooden plank floors which are fairly charming but ripply as hell. So (1) we wouldn't have bought expensive floor to cover them, we would have wanted to simply repaint them; and (2) they were so ripply that we found out we couldn't put the cork floor in the libroffice anyway. We've got a TON of cork floor. It's on top of our wardrobe and we don't know what to do with it. Meanwhile, it's likely there's a cute painted plank floor in the bedroom too, but we'd have to rip up the baseboards and the cork floor to find out and we decided we just didn't have the energy. SO MUCH UNNECESSARY FLOORING.
- We thought that because the specified house-appropriate paper-based old-fashioned wallpaper is expensive per meter it would be cheaper and easier to paint the living room. The thing is, we actually ended up painting it twice due to miscalculating the size of the cement wall and the viability of making a feature wall... but also, it's way harder to paint when there's already been wallpaper there than to just wallpaper again. Paint needs a smooth surface, ideally one without any wallpaper on it, and so we had to try to get to an entirely un-torn, whole underlayer of wallpaper after peeling away the top few layers of vinyl wallpapers, but wallpaper seldom comes off easily in one piece. The first layer of paper in our living room was textured, so the texture AND the seams show in the paint, as well as the spots where the layers on top of it weren't coming off smoothly and it got sanded down smooth. And then the zero-VOC water-based linseed oil-containing paint, which smelled great btw, took like five coats to even out. Because of the linseed oil content, this paint has a long curing time after it's dry to the touch, and it got damaged in several spots before three? months were up by being scratched. Also it's been scratched by bits of bunny cage since and will probably have to be wallpapered over at some point anyway. Ultimately, just wallpapering over it with more paper would've been way cheaper. ALSO: if we decided we hated all the patterns, we could've always papered it in a solid color.
- Also I tried really hard to find paper wallpapers, but ultimately both of the ones we got turned out to be the wrong type due to mislabeling! In the hallway that probably won't matter, but in the kitchen we put it back up over a spot where the insulation had to be replaced because there was a ton of water damage under the latex paint and vinyl wallpaper under the window. Clearly the window has been an issue in the past, and we didn't do anything to it, so it could be again, although the damage was old I think.
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Date: 23 Mar 2022 08:42 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 24 Mar 2022 09:56 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 24 Mar 2022 12:29 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 24 Mar 2022 09:53 am (UTC)So yeah, floor nightmares!
Of course I don't mention that we do have two rooms of beautiful honey oak parquets from the 1960s. Of course, we failed to adequately protect them from paint spots and scratches during renovation, but they are thick enough to be refinished when we some day get around to that. TBH I would trade them for crappy easy-care floors everywhere though. All the different layers have caused their own problems with thresholds trying to bridge the height difference - trip hazards for one thing, but more importantly, some of the gaps aren't standard threshold sized so there are multiple threshoolds or gaps that just fill up with SO MUCH DUST (because, you know, two angora house rabbits and two cats). I really do want like an air purifier, but the good ones have such a limited range that you'd need like six of them and they cost hundreds of bucks apiece! Also: thresholds would completely prevent Roomba use, assuming we wanted to get one of those!
I don't have a screaming forever icon so...:
(no subject)
Date: 24 Mar 2022 10:03 am (UTC)At least you have beautiful wallpaper.
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Date: 24 Mar 2022 11:32 am (UTC)