Edge Flooring. What a great idea.
you might want to check what others had to say about this stuff, but this is my experience with it.. you can find other comments here -
John Bridge Tiling Forum - Edge Flooring
What a great idea this stuff is.. unfortunately, that's where the positive comments end.
I was at Lowes picking out tile for our master bathroom when my wife commented on spending a little extra on Edge flooring to help to save myself some labor. It seemed like a good idea.. I didn’t really mind the tiling or grouting, but was not looking forward to laying backerboard necessary as it was going to be a second floor installation.
The room is roughly 80 sq ft.
Here is a summary of the problems I had.
The sections being 2 sq feet instead of 1 required a little more planning and thought each time one was placed. I’ve done rooms with real tile before, and it’s mark, cut, and place. But with the edge flooring (maybe I was just getting tired) several times I measured and cut right, but realized when I tried to place the tile that I had cut it with the tongue and grooves on the wrong end.
Even if I chalk that up as my inexperience.. it was still frustrating – Each incorrect cut cost me $6.80, although in some instances I was able to reuse some of the incorrectly cut pieces.
Of concern to me is the way the tiles near the sides tend to rest higher than the main part of the floor.. because the floor sits on padding, it only makes sense that the tiles on the end are not compressing the padding as much. When stepped on those tiles noticeably depress. Not sure the result of this in the long term or not but it does not happen at all with real tile.
The saw and jigsaw blades were a waste of money.. the jigsaw blade lasted through 3 tiles before the cutting edge was nothing more than a bare strip of metal. The saw blade wasn’t any better than a diamond blade that I had for cutting, so I returned the blades and used the diamond one.
The door frame strips didn’t work correctly. Someone else had mentioned how they had to ‘rig’ it to work. Here’s the problem with the frame strips. They are designed to go from a lower surface to a higher (the higher being the tile). I can assume that it would have worked correctly if the previous flooring was laminate even with my old carpet and I was installing ON TOP of the laminate. (thus making the new surface higher).. But it seems to me the more common situation is to remove the old stuff (I had carpet in the room previously). Once installed the carpet is nearly the same level as the tile.. What Edge should do is have a door strip for each circumstance. I would have preferred to have the edge strip snap down over the edge of the carpet to hold it in place.
Grout. Wow.. This needs to really be a message all in itself. How bad is this stuff?
30 Sq Ft per can?!?! Anyone get that? I managed to get 19 Sq Feet for the first THREE cans.. Although, here’s a tip if you are insistent on using Edge flooring.. The Lowes had 2 types of cans.. I only assume now that one is maybe a newer design? The first set of cans I had had a white tip. The ones with the white tip came out way to quick at first. Sputtered in the middle, and then nearly quit working. I returned all of those and got the ones with the green tips on them, and the grout appears to come out a little more consistent. I haven’t completed the install yet so I’m not sure if this is what I will find with all the green tipped cans.
All in all with the project complete, it took me 14 cans to fill 88 Sq Ft of tile.. ($140 worth of grout) although alot of the cans I returned for a refund because only half the grout would come out. This is probably not typical because I had alot of corners and edges that needed to be filled. If the room had been 9x10 it would not have been nearly as bad.
Then there is the issue with the grout sinking into the crack. What’s going on with that? It looks like I’ll need to cover the entire floor twice with grout.. I’ll say that grouting with real tiles is a WHOLE LOT easier.. I could grout a whole floor with real grout in fraction of the time, and I’m just a home do-it-yourselfer.
I also want to mention that the Lowes I had originally purchased the tile was $34.50 per case ($3.40 per sq ft). But when I went to another to pick up an extra case they had it at $29.50 per case ($2.90 per sq ft). The first one refunded me the difference.. but thought that was weird as the less expensive Lowes didn’t have it on sale or clearance.. it was just their normal price.
-Zippyfear.
using Lowes edge precision flooring
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