Well that was easy: installing vinyl tile

And heave-ho, in went the vinyl tiles! A lightning-quick run-down of that little process. First, it fell to me to clean the floor. Along the way Paolo’s somehow learned things about plumbing and wires. I need to rectify this skill imbalance quickly – because I don’t like the way my role is headed: bottom-dwelling floor scrubber.

The state of the old, blue vinyl floor required rubber gloves. Not the sissy yellow ones for regular germs: full-on, chemical explosion orange ones. And an entire box of TSP. Finally it was clean & we were ready to roll. Thanks to some studious measuring when the toilets were exchanged, we already had one tile in place (and I loved it).

But – wait – which way to lay these guys out?? I Googled – there’s a whole world of choice in tile placement. Would more complicated necessarily be better? We decided that it’s such a tiny room & you can see so little of the floor that easier was better. How’s that for master-decision-making? I believe it’s called “brick pattern” or some such — staggering them by half. Measured the suckers out, cut them with a sharp knife, peeled off the sticky back & stuck them down. At some point we involved a towel-covered rolling pin, and otherwise just walked on it.

Three absolute loves for vinyl tile installation: it’s quick, it’s clean, it’s silent. I can’t tell you what a boon this is for apartment renovations — it’s one of the only things we’ve ever been able to start and finish late at night. All told I think it took about three hours – only because we were being really, really anal about measuring & alignment.

Its final mega bonus – here’s one for impatient people everywhere – you get to stand back & see results right away. I loved the tile in the box – I love it even more now it’s in place. I let Paolo wear the knee pads as a special treat.

As a stroke of utter poetry – we had 24 square inches of tile leftover when finished. Barely a table scrap.

I know this whole deal is a massive learning curve – but I wish we’d known how easy this was a year ago. The piggy slippers could have been thrown to the curb as I knelt and kissed our bathroom floor.

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Photo credit to Nationaal Archief and Paul Trujillo via Flickr Creative Commons