Flooring Adventures
This is a blog about home renovation and remodeling specifically targeted at older homes that have been around a few decades and also home additions, some of which may be equally of close to the same age.
My experience is that with houses and their additions that have a few or more years under their belts is that the renovator can often times run into surprises after the project is initiated. My brother’s house is no exception. We’ve had friends with house renovations, and there’s always some surprise or other. If you’re really lucky you’ll find some old coins or some kind of history if you are taking down a wall. That makes it really a fun adventure.
I should interject that you need a positive attitude for this kind of work. You have to be flexible since houses are what they are, and you can’t change them. Just learn to love them.
Some of these occur just because houses, like us, age over time and things happen to the interior and exterior which may impact your renovation project.
The other reason, which should be apparent, is that the original construction and/or subsequent remodels may not have been done in a manner that we’re used to seeing today.
A shorthand way of putting that is “not up to code”.
An awful lot can be said about floors in a renovation project simply because there are so many different options for materials, styles resulting in vastly different looks.
Of course certain materials may by inadvisable for a specific application and others, though the application may be possible, don’t produce the desired style.
For example, expanding an old bath and a bedroom into a bath exercise suite in a dry climate with good room ventilation could allow carpet, hardwood, ceramic, stone or various laminates.
The same floor plan in a humid or freezing climate in a basement or with slightly less ventilation can rule out a number of those floor covering options.
Then again, ventilation and ambient temp and humidity can be altered. It depends how involved you want the project to become and of course the time and budget factors.
So I’ve said two apparently different things.
First, you may be limited by the structure, climate, time and money regarding the materials you can use and the style outcome they produce.
Secondly, you can do pretty much whatever you want, providing you’ll put in the required time, money and willingness to possibly make radical changes.
Both are true, but the unlimited time money and flexibility option generally isn’t .reasonable.
So for this discussion lets stay within reason.
Let’s look at a couple of different bathroom flooring sinarios in the nest post.
Bathrooms, though small, can be complex with their old an potential water problems.
Generally they’re crowded rooms and the plumbing fixtures have to be worked around.
Additionally baths most often are the rooms where prior renovations have been done and undoing these can present special challenges.