Joe and I worked a couple of days (mostly Joe, really) removing the old vinyl flooring. It came up easy, except for the seams, which were really well fused to the plywood. The tile installer wanted all the adhesive removed down to the bare plywood, and there was a thin film that stayed when the vinyl was pulled up.
We tried a lot of different strategies to remove the old brittle adhesive stuck to the plywood, but the best by far was just using the belt sander. Talk about your nasty toxic dust! This was one of the most difficult parts for me yet, as the heat of the belt sander seemed to reactivate the adhesive and the dust was filling up the house, making my asthma act up. I just hid out in the basement until the dust settled and we showered and cleaned each day after he finished. Yuck!
Owen delivered the tile and stacked it up at one end of the room. We chose Daltile Terra Atica in the 12 x 12" tiles. Rosso colorway. This is a solid body tile, meaning the color runs all the way through the tile rather than just being printed on the surface. We looked at a lot of tiles and I was very particular. I was really turned off by tiles that looked like a photograph. Especially the ones with bad pixilation and we saw a remarkable number of those. Seriously - it is pretty amazing what is out there on the market!
Joe and I had been looking all over town and I had been looking online when we met Owen, our installer. He told us to go to the Daltile Showroom in west Billings, and they had the Terra Atica installed on the showroom floor. It looked really great with the granite we had in mind, so it was a pretty easy decision.
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