the Price of Floor Repair and Refinishing

The service involved repairing a section of tile floor on the entry landing that was damaged when a railing was removed. The tiles were non-standard and had to be matched from old stock once the manufacturer was found.

The company specializes in tile sales and installations. They stock a variety of tiles in their stores, though the stores are mostly displays of tile samples and examples of the company's work. They will order whatever is needed from manufacturers catalogs, or even have pieces made to specification, if needed.

They have stated an ability and willingness to tile any rigid surface. And they also build showers.

Our entryway is tiled in odd-sized (metric, actually) cream ceramic tiles. There's a double-door sized opening off to the left into the carpeted living room. When we bought the house there was a wooden railing screwed to the wall and glued to the tile floor. Removing the railing afforded easier access to the living room, but proved damaging to the plaster on the walls and the floor tiles. We fixed the plaster easily enough but the tiles were another matter.

We removed the damaged tiles ourselves and after some legwork found that nobody in town seemed to stock them or anything quite the same color or size. After much visiting of stores, we found a place that was willing to do the work to get the tiles. Most of the price ended up being legwork in tracking down the manufacturer in eastern Europe who was using another manufacturer's identifying mark (the owner of the mark didn't have the tiles in their catalog, but the other company's older catalogs did have the tile).

In total we bought about 100 square feet of tile as an emergency measure since a fair bit of our floor is tiled the same as the entrance, and because the job was small (maybe 3 square feet total), we managed to do the repairs ourselves in an afternoon after a bit of instruction on setting and grouting tile.

The service was excellent and we're considering contracting them to replace an aging fiberglass bathtub with a tiled shower.

If you have an oddball problem like we did, see if you can find someone with a love of their trade. Someone who can talk for hours about the minutia of the difference between tile mud and mastic, what kind of grout you need for which application, and can get you to care about the details. We did and it was incredibly helpful. Finding a great tradesman is like finding a great car mechanic: someone you don't want to lose.

Or better yet, find out how to remove stuck-on stuff from tile without destroying it as that would have saved us the trouble. Oh, and if or when you get tile installed, make sure you get a few extra square feet of tile for inevitable repairs and the like. It'll save you, or your home's next owner, a lot of trouble.