apartment therapy changing the world, one room at a time

My husband and I recently redid our kitchen and my father, who is very handy, put them in for us as a gift. It took him around twelve hours to install a 14x15 kitchen...but they look great. We get compliments on them all the time. We used a solution to level and even the floor (which home depot has) and they have stayed in placed for a while now. We picked the ones that look like slate and couldn't be more pleased. They are hard to cut, but if the room is square (we have a radiator and 1946 walls) is should run smoothly.

Before selecting a very cheap material consider this:
vinyl is very harmful to the environment during its creation, it off-gases during its lifetime and can not be recycled.
Armstrong is a large company that is working to eliminate vinyl and other harmful chemicals from there products. So the tile you are looking at may not be made up of vinyl and a little research may clear this up.
But if the product is composed of vinyl you may want to look at other more sustainable products on the market. Please consider the environmental aspects of the product before selecting it based on it first cost.
The movie "Blue Vinyl" discusses the environmental aspects of the vinyl if you are interested.

I have done this several times, so here are some tips,
1. Thicker is better than thinner tile.
2. Follow directions carefully.
3. Practice making the cuts and learn to do this well.
4. Make sure there isn't any dirt on what you are tiling over.
5. I could go on and on but, now that I think about it, resist the urge to use self sticking tile.

I've used self sticking tile in my entire house. The bedroom is black and white checkered and looks great and people think it was one big sheet. I've had no shifting with those tiles, but you have to get the tiles really tight together.

I used a pergo looking tile in the rest of the house and, though it's the same brand, they have not suck together as well.

Word of warning: Your finger tips will be very sore from all sticking.

pb - did you use a roller on your tiles?

Been there, done that. COnsidering it took 3 hours and about $50 to stick over some horrid old linoleum w/ cute black and white checkerboard, it was great:

http://img.inkfrog.com/pix/becky740/my_kitchen.JPG

However, the corners tend to come up after awhile. The white parts trap dirt and grime that does not come out, not even w/ a Mr. Clean Magic Eraser and LOTS of elbow grease. If you are just living there a year or two, it's perfect. Three years is pushing its lifespan.

However, someone told me that it should have been sealed afterwards, so make sure and ask about if that's true and how to do the sealing part of the task, and I imagine it will be more durable and easier to clean than mine was.

Becky

i helped my parents install them since i've done regular tiles. if there is ANY inperfection on the floor, the tiles won't stick. i was a tad concerned by how little adhesive there was.

When we bought our house in 2002 the half-bathroom had peel-n-stick tiles. It's such a small space that we haven't really paid much attention to how it looks (not bad), and not a single one of them has lifted up from the floor. That said, I don't know if they would hang in there as long in a space that had more use, like your kitchen.

Wow--$700 seems like a LOT to pay for sheet vinyl flooring in a small bathroom. Maybe your conception of "small" is way bigger than mine, maybe you bought the world's most expensive flooring, maybe the floor needed some repairs before the vinyl was put down? If not, I think you got stiffed.

We took out vinyl squares from our small (5 foot by 8 foot) bathroom and installed sheet vinyl. We did it ourselves and spent maybe $100 on materials, including baseboard. We spent another $100 or so paying our housemate, a professional remodeler, to fix some rotting floorboards before we put the flooring down.

I would be reluctant to use stick-down vinyl squares in a wet room like a kitchen or bath. I can't imagine you could get a real seal between squares, so any time you splash or spill you'll get water down between them. Definitely not good for a long-term installation. I have kids, they splash water out of the tub like crazy, so sheet flooring was a must in the bathroom.

It seems like most vinyl flooring is made to look like other materials--tile, stone, brick, wood--many of which look pretty cheesy. Since our bathroom is so small we picked a pattern that looked like small tiles, 1.5 inches square, in muted greens/browns/oyster grey. Just yesterday an appraiser came to check out our house, glanced around the bathroom, and asked if the tiles were original! (My husband tells me I shouldn't have set her straight that they weren't actually tile...)

About a year ago I enlisted the help of my mother and we laid down peel and stick tiles in my bathroom over some awful yellowing vinyl flooring from what we could guess was the 70's. It was questionable what was under that flooring and if we wanted to risk getting ourselves into a potential disaster since my place is a rental, so we installed the tiles directly over it. We picked an imitation slate that coordinates with the grey in the shower tile's decorative trim.

It was a fairly easy install, the biggest pain would be measuring and cutting the tiles to fit a few odd little nooks. I'm happy with how it turned out, but I've noticed over time (maybe due to the humidity levels?) that they're subtlly shifting on one section of the floor that isn't perfectly level, leaving gaps between them. I'm considering filling the gaps with something like a silicone caulking to keep the dirt and grime from falling between them, which could potentially loosen them if it works it's way underneath.

Overall it's not a bad option if you go into it knowing it's not a longterm solution. It's a good quickfix to make a rental unit livable or until you're able to afford the expensive floor install you really want.

I've done the peel 'n stick. Same black and white squares as becky above. 29 cents/sq foot, can't beat it. My small kitchen went from super icky to livable for $35. The tiles over the really rough part of the floor didn't stick well, but I bought a small tub of the mastic you use to put down regular vinyl tiles and it worked great there.

It's true, peel 'n sticks are vinyl. But then again so are Flor carpet squares, for instance, although they would like you to believe they are green. I called Flor and asked...they hemmed and hawed but finally admitted it.

If you do want a cheap easy solution that is more green, try cork. You can buy it on line for as little as 99 cents/sq ft from Lumber Liquidators. You glue it down with contact cement, and cut it with scissors. Almost as easy as peel 'n stick and cooler.