Category Archives: Flooring

Flooring improvement projectsOn this category, you will find the different flooring improvement projects I have completed. Most of them involve the replacement of vinyl or carpet for a nicer tile option. However, very recently, I also completed a hardwood flooring installation! Enjoy!

Spray Painting Vent Covers To Match Floor Color

spray paint cans

Choosing the right spray paint color for our vent covers

Is it just us or wouldn’t it be better if vent covers didn’t stand out as much as they usually do? In our area, chances are they are beige, even though your flooring is a dark walnut (our case). They may be white, even though your carpet is beige. Or they may be dark brown even though your flooring is a really nice travertine tile.

Does anyone really think they look nice like that?

We don’t. In a perfect world, they’d be completely invisible. However, since that may be next to impossible, we believe that spray painting them is one of the best alternatives you can try to hide, blend or disguise them as much as possible.

On this post, we show you how to do it.

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Our New Porcelain Tile Garage Floor Installation

Garage floor prior to porcelain tile installation

The garage floor right before we started this project

This is the third and last part of our new garage finishing project.

On our previous two posts, we showed you how we insulated, dry walled, primed and painted our new garage. With all those projects out of the way, it was time to move on and install a nice porcelain tile garage floor.

We did it last because we didn’t want to get our new nice porcelain all dirty while working with drywall, primer, and paint.

As you have read before, in our previous two garages, we used epoxy, however, as you have also read, I was not very satisfied with it. So I decided to try something different in our new garage.

After looking at different options, I decided to give porcelain a try, mostly because as you may know by now, it is one of my favorite flooring options. We went with a two color, white and gray design.

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Installing Hardwood Flooring in the Living and Dining Room Areas

Laying Maple Hardwood Flooring over Plywood

Maple Hardwood Flooring

This project of Installing Hardwood Flooring in the Living and Dining Room Areas was completed right after the kitchen’s Travertine Tile flooring upgrade and the White Quartz countertop installation. However, to keep some kind of sequence, I decided to present the Kitchen’s Backsplash Wall Preparation and Installation first.

When we finally started working on this project, it was about time we took care of these two areas of the house. The carpet in the living room was in very bad shape and dirty (I did not want to have it cleaned as I always planned to replace it), it had to go. The vinyl flooring in the dining area: well, you know what I think about vinyl flooring.

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Improving the Kitchen: Laying Travertine Tile Flooring

New kitchen, brick pattern travertine flooring

New kitchen brick pattern Travertine flooring

Up until this point, I had neglected (if you can call it that way) some areas of the house, the kitchen was one of them.

It is not that it was not important to me, actually, it is very important, because of this house’s open floor plan, the kitchen is visible to all visitors as soon as they walk in. However, as always in life, some things take priority and that’s why I completed a whole bunch of projects outside, in the laundry room, the garage, and the bathrooms, just to name a few before I was able to even look at it.

Once I was able to focus on the kitchen, as a first step, I decided to go ahead and remove the existing vinyl flooring, so I could then start laying Travertine tile. The same type I had already installed in the bathroom floors.

This may sound kind of crazy for those of you not in the US, however, over here, it is very common for builders to install the same type of flooring in different rooms, usually, the kitchen, bathrooms and laundry rooms, and the same carpet in all bedrooms (cheaper?).

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Laying Travertine Tile in the Bathroom Floors

Installing travertine tile in the bathroom floors

Travertine tile in the bathroom floors

If you’ve read my previous flooring or tiling posts, I’m sure this one does not come up as a surprise, Laying Travertine tile in the bathroom floors was planned since day one.

Well, I didn’t know it was going to be Travertine tile, but I was completely sure I was replacing the existing flooring with a nicer tile option. In other words, you can basically add the bathroom floors to the list of items I noticed immediately, the first time I went look at the house.

In case you don’t know, others are: the lack of storage in the laundry room, and the fact that the garage was almost completely unfinished.

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Finishing the Garage Part 2: Applying an Epoxy Floor Coating

Epoxy Floor coating in the garage

Garage epoxy floor coating, part of my garage finishing project

After insulating and finishing the walls and ceiling, the next step on this garage finishing project was working on applying an epoxy floor coating.

To be honest, after doing the exact same job in my old garage (I did not document that project), I was not completely sure about doing it in this new one.

I did not have any issues with the epoxy bubbling or peeling, however, I did notice that after a few months, it did not look nice, it looked like an old floor, even right after being cleaned up.

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Replacing Vinyl Flooring with Porcelain Tile

Master bath tile in place and grouted

Finished Master Bath tile work!

One thing I’ve never liked about most houses’ finishes is the flooring selection. Unless we are talking about higher end homes, most home builders only offer two flooring options, carpet and vinyl.

I specifically want to talk about vinyl, because I understand carpet has its place, especially in colder areas of the country, where you don’t want your feet to freeze every time you get out of bed or walk around the house in your pajamas on a rainy Sunday morning.

However, I don’t understand why, in this day and age, they insist on offering the vinyl option. I know, it is cheaper, perhaps not by much though, after considering that they need to install some kind of underlayment under it, but other than that, I cannot think of any other real benefit when compared to tile (whether it be ceramic, natural stone, porcelain or others), which is my favorite flooring option, for many of the following reasons, and more:

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