Ok, I feel really stupid; "you get what you pay" for really holds true here:
I had tile installed in a very small kitchen/dining area that transitions into the living room of a tiny condo. The whole area was about 120 square feet. The transition between the tile and the living room is nine feet long. A friend of a friend did it, the friend is a general contractor and he supervised, took the measurements and gave me the price, while his "tile guy" laid the actual tile. They both sounded super confident and like they knew what they were doing, of course their day job is at a car lot, so I guess I should have known...
Anyway to try and keep it short, some alarm bells went off when I realized, after they first starting laying the tile, that they didn't remove my quarter round or even ask me if I wanted to remove it. Then the main guy told me that it was ok because they could just grout the edges of the room... That didn't sound right either...
They did half the room the first night from 6-12pm and came back the next morning and laid the other half. At this point I had already googled the wall grout joint issue and told them that I didn't want grout in those joints, I wanted caulk instead. Little did I know he had no clue what I was referring to(sanded tile caulk.)
The other guy laid the rest of the main pieces that didn't need to be cut and when he was done I realized that the way he done all the tile made it so that the nine foot transition into the living room was going to look REALLY awkward.. He had run a row of full tile along the entryway wall (the main guy said he had to do it that way because the walls were crooked)... So that meant that right in where I wanted the tile to end in the middle of my tiny house I was going to have a nine foot strip of two inches of cut tile followed by a 1.75" transition strip; that seemed like it would look awful!! Later I realized that the reason they did it that way was because they didn't want to use/didn't have a real tile saw and had planned all along to just use one of those $20 tile scoring cutters for the whole job, and then grout the wall joints even though I specifically told them I did not want that done. I had planned on going and picking up the grouted caulk for them, but come time to grout he basically told me that the main guy had told him to still grout it and that I could come back later with caulk if I wanted white trim.....
hday number tw
Sent from my iPhone using Flooring Forum
I had tile installed in a very small kitchen/dining area that transitions into the living room of a tiny condo. The whole area was about 120 square feet. The transition between the tile and the living room is nine feet long. A friend of a friend did it, the friend is a general contractor and he supervised, took the measurements and gave me the price, while his "tile guy" laid the actual tile. They both sounded super confident and like they knew what they were doing, of course their day job is at a car lot, so I guess I should have known...
Anyway to try and keep it short, some alarm bells went off when I realized, after they first starting laying the tile, that they didn't remove my quarter round or even ask me if I wanted to remove it. Then the main guy told me that it was ok because they could just grout the edges of the room... That didn't sound right either...
They did half the room the first night from 6-12pm and came back the next morning and laid the other half. At this point I had already googled the wall grout joint issue and told them that I didn't want grout in those joints, I wanted caulk instead. Little did I know he had no clue what I was referring to(sanded tile caulk.)
The other guy laid the rest of the main pieces that didn't need to be cut and when he was done I realized that the way he done all the tile made it so that the nine foot transition into the living room was going to look REALLY awkward.. He had run a row of full tile along the entryway wall (the main guy said he had to do it that way because the walls were crooked)... So that meant that right in where I wanted the tile to end in the middle of my tiny house I was going to have a nine foot strip of two inches of cut tile followed by a 1.75" transition strip; that seemed like it would look awful!! Later I realized that the reason they did it that way was because they didn't want to use/didn't have a real tile saw and had planned all along to just use one of those $20 tile scoring cutters for the whole job, and then grout the wall joints even though I specifically told them I did not want that done. I had planned on going and picking up the grouted caulk for them, but come time to grout he basically told me that the main guy had told him to still grout it and that I could come back later with caulk if I wanted white trim.....
hday number twSent from my iPhone using Flooring Forum
