The long awaited flooring update post

Well, if you have been following our flooring adventures  you may recall that our slab wasn't sealed in our condo completely... and it was an issue we had to involve our HOA with.

It took a lot of back and forth with the HOA, and folks coming and going, but eventually the HOA paid for the remainder of our floors to be removed at their expense, and for red guard to be applied directly to the slab throughout the entire unit to act as a moisture barrier.

Basically everything but the kitchen and bathroom wasn't sealed. (When they removed the tile in our living room, they found more moisture underneath it, so both bedrooms and the living room were affected). 

BEFORE:

DURING RIP OUT:

ADDING RED GUARD (which is actually red)

This is where the HOA left the job. In addition to paying to seal our concrete, they installed more drains around the outside of our unit to prevent water from pooling during heavy rains as another stop gap type of fix.

What they didn't cover, was our new floors. The geologist team recommended only professionals install the flooring and only tile be installed in the unit, not carpet, so we had to pay for new floors ourselves. The delay in the whole process came because I'm on the board of directors for our complex, so they had to take several meetings to form a committee to discuss our unit in proper channels without me on the calls, and had to have enough other HOA board members present to make decisions. Eventually the HOA legal team decided that sealing the concrete constituted bare walls, which is the HOA responsibility, so we were not reimbursed for our tile replacement or our hotel displacement for the week it all took place.

Our homeowners insurance would not cover the flooring because it was only damaged by the HOA ripping it up to fix the issue with the foundation, which can't be covered under our Condo homeowners policy. So a homeowner expense.

In the end, we paid for new floors from Home Depot. I love our new tile, but it was a second battle to even get our tile materials due to Covid. The store we purchase from promised they would transfer materials from another store that had ample stock, but then they stopped certain types of store to store transfers due to covid and we got stuck in the middle... after 6 or 7 weeks of calling home depot, going in person for updates, and flat out begging to get my materials, it took me crying in the store 3 days before my removal started in front of a slew of people, telling them I'd drive up to the store and get it myself in their home depot rental truck if they would just release the tile to me since I paid for it, for someone to make it happen. (Even then they said I would have to purchase new tile, and have the old tile eventually refunded to me, requiring more upfront costs....) And at the end of the day that idea only died when they realized we would need two trucks to handle the weight of the tile and there was only one of me, all five feet girl determined).

So in tears, someone called the store and told them to load it and deliver it and by a miracle of God, my tile arrived as they were ripping it out, because I had to use TWO different crews.,.. the HOA crew that did the removal and sealing, and then the home depot install team. 

But in the end, my tile got installed... 

And then we had some issues with leveling the concrete so the tile would lay flat in the master bedroom (so we paid more to have that area leveled.). 

The crew ran out of materials and forced my husband to leave work and go and buy more materials for leveling to keep the job on time. When I questioned this, the install crew said the company would not let them pick up the mortar bags directly from home depot... which led to more apologies from Home Depot because this was counter to their business practices because they had my card on file for anything that might go wrong like needing another bag of 4 bags of mortar.  Unfortunately in the leveling process, we got a bump... all the tiles lines up nicely, no tile to tile shifts, but a little too much leveling material in one spot and our bed rocked really loudly... 

The only solution was to rip out almost the whole room and redo it, but we didn't have enough tile to do that and I worried that might mess up the red guard seal, so they refunded us part of the leveling charges and helped us add some felt tabs to the bed to keep it from rocking.  

It was a miracle our floors got done... but they are pretty and I love them. We still need to do built in cabinets in the living room and base boards (we re-did our closets in the master already), but those are going to wait a bit because we bought hubs a car last year... (Yup, escort finally died).

But for now, we love having floors and this place feels more finished each year. 

Tile Flooring install and materials: $7,323.36

Hotel Stay: $769.02
New Toilet: $206.80 (cause you don't install an old one when you have to pay someone to do it)
New Hot/Cold Valves: $327.31 (Ya, we tried to undo the appliances and the valves were bad.... so we replaced those as well).