Saturday, January 20, 2007

The Littlest Room--The Biggest Expense

It's time to replace my bathroom floor. The folks who sold me the place installed their own tile, and they did it very badly. The whole top floor of my townhouse squeaks--it's fine with me, and it reminds me of my grandmother's house. But evidently the bathroom tile doesn't have such pleasant associations. It's loose, and the grout is coming apart.

I was just going to slap some floating cork floor in, figuring that a floating floor would be able to handle the slight movement of the subfloor with more grace than the tile. But evidently that is a BAD idea. If you're going to install cork in a bathroom, you evidently want tiles, and all tiles (whether they are cork or ceramic) have the same aversion to a squeaky subfloor.

Which means I need some kind of professional to come and look at the floor, rip up the tile, and stop it squeaking before I can even choose a floor for the bathroom, let alone replace it. I have this horror film playing in my head that involves redoing the whole third floor of the townhouse. (How can you stop the bathroom floor from moving if the floor RIGHT outside the bathroom is moving all the time? Let's hope a pro has a good answer to that one.)

I woke up this morning feeling fairly energetic and ready to make some progress, but this news is very depressing. I may need to go back to bed now. Maybe if I stay there all day, I'll lose the pound and a half I inexplicably gained yesterday.

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