One of my neighbors recently replaced the 8″x8″ white ceramic tile & carpet throughout their home with beautiful solid oak floors. They were ecstatic with not only how they came out but the great price they got on the wood floors themselves.
They actually picked up their floors via a deal I came across in my Real Estate dealings. A client was selling them for a steal as he needed the boxes out of his garage. He had 1,000 square feet of Mohawk solid oak wood floors that he only wanted $1 a square for – I posted it to my client and friends in an email and my neighbors snapped them up. But you can look for similar deals using CraigsList where you can always find bargains.
We don’t have before pictures but the after photos show you how great they came out. They did the work all on their own and it was a back breaking undertaking but by doing so saved about $700 just in removing the old tile. To lay the floors would have cost at least a couple thousand dollars so between materials and labor this job would have been in the $8-10,000 range when you take in to account the cost of materials, demo and lobor.
It’s a messy job so they had plastic draping off the other rooms in the house, wore respirator masks and did a clean-up at the end of each day to contain the mess and keep it from tracking all over the house. The entire project took them about two solid weeks but you’ll see it was well worth it. Their new floors gleam!
Lessons learned were pretty minimal as the project went well for them. They started with a chisel and hammer breaking out the tile but finally resorted to renting the equivalent of a jack hammer with a special blade to remove the rest of it. They said they wish they’d done that earlier because it cut the demo time down to a fraction of the hammer and chisel route. They also underestimated just how pervasive the dust is when you break out the tile so they probably would have bagged and sealed more of their personal items, cupboards and furniture.