The Vinyl Tile Horror Part 2

Where did we leave off? Oh yea, we are at day 7 and the flooring project is completed! Whoo! Eager to see my beautiful floors, I burst through the front door with eyes filled with anticipation. But, what every homeowner does not want to see was in fact, what I saw, that dreaded add-on room that I talked about in my earlier post.

May I remind you that the flooring guy was so confident he could make the floor even? Well, nope. He did not. How can I explain this best as to how it looked? You know when you walk on sand at the beach and you leave a foot imprint in the sand? THAT’S HOW IT LOOKED! I know it’s supposed to be a tiki room but I never said to have it look as though you were walking on sand! Could it even get worse? OH YEA! Remember when I said that we bought the asbestos free streaked tile and that we had just enough for the square footage we needed and we couldn’t buy it anywhere else because we bought the last of what they ever made? Yup! All gone. Used every last box! 

      

       So, as you can imagine, now they have to redo the entire tiki room with flooring I didn’t even want. Now I’m back to square one, shopping for what can possibly compare to what I loved. My wonderful, optimistic husband looked at me and said, “But Rochelle, look at the rest of the work they did with the tile you wanted and how great it looks.” As I tried to change my frustrated, irritated, angry, mad, disappointed, sad, (okay I’ll stop there) eyes, I widened them to hopefully see some light of goodness on the rest of the project. As my eyes widened I slowly started to see the rest of the nightmare. I didn’t title this the Horror for nothing. Oh, did I mention we are now at Day 23 at my parents’ house because we can’t lay down the floor polish until all the mistakes are fixed? And, all of our furniture is stuffed in our third bedroom. Anyway, back to opening my eyes with many emotions. I started to see that when they tore up the horrible terracotta tile, they ended up busting holes in the cement. Okay, no big deal, they will just fill that before laying down the vinyl, that remember, shows every little thing. Oh, but yes, you guessed it. They didn’t. 

 

As we walked around, our heels started slowly sinking in the quicksand holes and cracking the tile. I’m sorry, actually no I’m not, how can you be so, hmm....how do I put this in the nicest way possible? When a momma bird is building her nest, she finds a nice sturdy foundation before laying all of her nesting supplies to protect her babies. She doesn’t see a twig of a branch and say, “Eh, that will be good enough.”. No, Matt and I are not the flooring guys’ baby birds, but if I’m paying them good money, I expect it to be laid on a good foundation so that the baby bird in me doesn’t go tumbling into my vinyl’s quicksand. Matt got on the phone with the flooring guy because as you might know, what’s good for everyone is for me to not get on the phone with someone I’m angry with. He explained to the flooring guy about all of the problems and his reply was, and I quote, “People nowadays don’t really lay vinyl tile so, most of us flooring people don’t really know how to lay it anymore.” Well, I feel really bad for any schools installing new vinyl flooring because all the children will have to be sent to the nurses office from falling in the pits because no one knows how to lay it anymore!! Also, since “no one lays it anymore” they left tons of goopy glue all over the tile. So, now the momma bird forgot to clean up all of the nest paste and all of her baby birds are stuck in the nest. Haha, oh goodness, my exaggeration just sky rockets when I’m upset. Well, you know my dear sweet husband that always looks on the bright side. He comes walking in with a scrubbie and tile cleaner and says, “I will scrub it!”. “Okay okay,” I said, “I’m just going to sit down for a moment to settle my emotions.” As I took in deep breaths, I stood up to help my dear sweet husband that....AH!! My eyes widened in disbelief! As if it couldn’t get any worse, but it did.