Problems and Solutions

The kitchen renovation is moving slowly forward. 

The floor has been a stumbling block, it has areas where the old tile have lifted, broken, and left holes in the tile floor.  Unfortunately the 9 by 9 inch tile size and the age of the tile means it is probably vinyl asbestos.  Sigh current recommendation for this type of floor is to leave it in place and float a floor over it if it is in good shape.  Well most of ours is but there are those two damaged areas....  and those areas have seemed to be an insolvable problem.   

If our floor was on a slab the recommendation to use a self leveling flooring compound would work but our floor is on top of a wood floor on top of a wood subfloor.  Our damaged areas are bare wood so anything liquid you put on them would cause problems as the wood absorbs the moisture from the liquid and then swells.  This would cause more tiles to lift and break which would totally defeat the purpose of the self leveling compound.  

Today a salesman at Menards had another suggestion.  This wonderful man suggested we find a tile that is the same thickness as our old tiles and use a modern adhesive to use the new tiles to patch our holes forming a level floor ready for us to install a floating floor system of our choice.   :-) Tomorrow we will start looking for cheap tile of the right size.

So with the floor problem hopefully solved we again looked at various floating floor options.  Sigh once again product weakness and our house design conspired against us to limit our choices.    We have lovely large windows on the south and the west side of our kitchen/breakfast nook.   That area gets lots of sun during the summer months.   The vinyl laminate floating tiles we had first chosen have a problem with sunlight and heat on them but there is another workable solution for our kitchen a floating porcelain tile system.  We need to do a bit more research but for now this is what we will be going with.