Hello - Orange Ca

[chrisdawg]

Hi my name is Chris and I just bought a 2100/6200 foreclosure. Its a 5/3 RR with a 2 car garage. I redid the paint and flooring myself. We managed a 16x16 diagonal/offset with the 80% of the house. The seal is a dull one but works well with the style. The tile colors are autumn and work well with the coffee colors painted on the wall.

The master bed room shower was a problem and ended up getting someone to do that for me using the slate for the final room. Now working on finishing up with slating one of the rear bedrooms and carpeting the last room. Molding is another task that hasnt been budgeted yet but is expected to be finished by the end of the year.

I decided to join this forum because I am no expert at doing all this myself. I also have a little "know how" on slate and am willing to help anyone.

 

[Nestor_Kelebay]

Hi Chris:

What does "I just bought a 2100/6200 foreclosure. Its a 5/3 RR" mean?

What does "We managed a 16x16 diagonal/offset with the 80% of the house." mean?

I really don't know how to interpret the statement: "The seal is a dull one but works well with the style." What seal are you talking about? Is it the tile or grout sealer on the tiling you refer to in the subsequent statement: "The tile colors are autumn and work well with the coffee colors painted on the wall."

Thanks for offering to help with setting slate. I expect a lot of people are finding slate to be an attractive and practical alternative to ceramic or porcelain tiles.

 

[chrisdawg]

My wife and I bought a 2100 Sq Ft house 7200 Sq Ft Lot single family residence. It has 5 bedrooms, 3 Bathrooms and built in 1962. Its existing floor was installed incorrectly and the paint needed to be redone. We took it upon ourselves to make it livable. So My wife and I decided to use autumn slate for the whole flooring and a cafe color pallet for the paint.

Next task was to find some slate since the paint wasn't going to be a problem finding. After shopping around all day in Anaheim we got to a place called Emer's Tile. They offered us 2200 sq ft worth for a 5,000. After comparing this with 7 other places, we took the deal and was dropped off at the driveway the week after the purchase 2 months before move in. Slate comes in various sizes. Emer's had 12in x 12in and 16in x 16in. We chose 16in x 16in that worked with our new home and decided to use a diagonal offset type of layout.

The best way to describe diagonal offset would be to say: You lay a row of tiles on the floor diagonally then the next row of diagonal tiles are offset from the first row from the middle tile on the first row. So it looks like a brick wall but it is a diagonal row and square.

This was done with 80 percent of the flooring because later we found out that the master bedroom's shower pan was leaking badly. So we had to use our final room worth of slate to finish up the shower. Now that the shower is finally done, I got enough leftover slate to finish up 1 out of 2 rooms. The last room we will use carpet.

As for doing diagonal offset, its very nice looking but very tedious. Making the special cuts for the doorways and corners became a challenge. But we were able to get it done with the major parts of the house.

I used a sealer for the tile. There is a protector sealer and a enhancement sealer. I used a protective seal after grouting but to enhance it I used a low gloss sealer. This was fine because using high gloss gave it a bathroom look and i didnt see that to be fitting for the style of the house. Instead we just left that for the shower.

So far its been a lot of work but doing it yourself saved us a lot of money. Later on I found this job to be worth more or less 20,000.

 

[Nestor_Kelebay]

Thanks for the info, Chris.

Since you're using this slate throughout your house, I'd say it would be a good idea to buy some spare slate just like what you have in case you need to replace any slate in the future.

Welcome aboard.