The other night my wife turned on the heater and shortly after there was a prolonged crackling sound - and when it was done, our sort-of flat floor was no longer flat, and instead there was a long crack running between the tiles, with the crack a “ridge”, and the tiles on either side pushed up around them. The tiles have become detached from the floor below, and there’s a lot of bumping and cracking when we walk over them now, including gusts of wind emerging from the cracks if you apply pressure on the tile in just the right way. On a hot summer day, I may even appreciate those little puffs, but I still suspect this is something I should have fixed. Plus every few days there’s another prolonged crackling noise, and more ruptures appear.
I assume we need our flooring redone. The kitchen, living room, and one bedroom are all part of the same tile floor; a computer room and another bedroom have slightly elevated wooden flooring, which has always been quite uneven. I suspect the previous owner put the wooden flooring on top of tiles with a similar problem; this “tile eruption” is a known issue in our building (a 13-floor tower in an apartment complex, about 15 years old now).
So: how does getting flooring redone work? Has anyone gone through this, and what would they recommend? Please keep in mind that I am a DIY idiot. And klutz.
Specific questions:
What’s good to get? I was assuming we’d just get new tiles. My wife’s aunt’s recommended person (ah, Taiwan and the world of connections!) came over and showed us what I think in English is called laminate flooring. Any advice one way or the other on things like cost, durability, cleanliness, etc? If it makes a difference, we have cats (who like to puke!), and no kids.
What’s the process like? Is this done during the day, room by room, and you can still live at home, even if you want to get out during the daytime construction work? Or do you have to move out while it’s going on? If so, for how long?
Gulp … what kind of range are we talking for cost per ping? Both for materials and labor?
The floor is just erupting in one (fairly big!) area. How [un]wise / [im]practical is it to just redo the floor in the living room, and not do anything in the kitchen and bedroom which currently have the same tiling? I suspect our best bet is redo everything, since I’d also like to fix the seriously non-level wooden flooring, but that’s a “get done one day” priority, whereas the crackling tiles seem pretty urgent. But the cost scares me.
For what it’s worth, we own the apartment, and we’re about halfway through a twenty-year mortgage, so I can’t just throw this all at a landlord. We’re planning to be here, well, let’s call it forever, so I’m willing to pay more now to save money later.
Never had this issue, but when we bought our apartment we replaced the tiles with wood. It was around 3500 per square meter, took around about a day to put the floor down. Always have a professional check it out first, and don’t let them just put new tiles or lino (what you called laminate flooring) over the tiles like they will want to do. The tile pull up will take a day or two.
Putting flooring down is pretty quick, our guys did the kitchen/lounge/dining (1 big open area thanks to wall removal), 4 bedrooms and 2 bathrooms in a day and a half. Your’s should be done much quicker.
Make sure to ALWAYS check reviews on the place you are going to get it done by, I have found Taiwanese builders are half-assed when it comes to any interior renovations…
What I know about flooring being redone is that guys come in with a compressor and pneumatic chipping hammer and start chipping out your floor or part of it.
That’s what the neighbors had done for like a full week (they did the whole house). Than the tile guys came in (they put huge floor tiles).
They did the whole house, bathrooms, kitchen, living room, bedroom … and they had actually 13F and 14F connected with a concrete stair and removed that, took another week. Two weeks dust and noise.
Indeed. When we had my home checked, they offered two ways:
Put the tiles on top of current ones. Faster.
Do the pneumatic drill thinghie and then put the new tiles. They also said a week. 26 ping.
My floor is also uneven but the only tile cracking we have is the exterior walls.
They say we have to vacate the premises. We cannot live in while they change the tiles.
Costs may go from over a 100k to … whatever. Mostly labor intensive.
Laminate is cheap so they like it here. I have cats. Litter dust sticks to laminate like… poop. Cement actually. And it is harder to clean the corners, whiich leads to flea infestations as eggs are hard to kill. I use the steam, which lifts the laminate, which leads to more cracks where more dust/flea eggs/gook can hide… ad nauseum.
I do suspect that in @lostinasia 's case, there is also an issue with the pipes under the floor. Some kind of leak caused this fisure. I’d sall shui dien too.
Wanna meet my neighbor? They do nice work… in Xindian. Not cheap.
Had an apartment some years ago with the same issue, floor tiles would erupt and crack in the winter months, although not as dramatic as yours. It was likely due to the contraction of the steel and concrete slab during the winter, once the weather warmed up it would become flat again as the slab expanded. Given yours coincided with the heater use it may be a slightly different cause. What type/power of heater did you use?
Removing tiles will definitely be a move out and move/cover furniture exercise. If you’re in a managed complex they may not allow any work until after CNY, check with your management agent if there is one.
The heater was just our air conditioning unit - it has a heater function as well. Since that first fissure, there have been several more aftershocks as the cracks either spread or become wider. Like I said, this is a problem that others in the building have apparently had as well - shoddy workmanship at the beginning, I guess. Some tiles at the other end of the living room have been uneven for ages - but not actually separated. It’s a problem I’ve feared would be coming for a long while, and now it’s here.
I hope to god it’s not water. For what it’s worth, this isn’t particularly near the pipes in the bathrooms or the kitchen or the balcony. But in my ignorance, I’m not sure how pipes are laid out in apartments.
We’re still in the stages of talking to different people to get an idea of what this is going to involve. I’m a little confused about the widely predicted timespans here! The main guy we’ve talked to said they’d have to remove all the tiles and prep the underlying concrete before putting on the new flooring, but my wife didn’t ask him about a timespan.
Logically to me laminate (lino? Internet searches tell me they’re not the same, but I’m not sure if the differences are significant enough for me to figure out) would seem better than tile, because if there’s further shifting, the laminate would respond better. And this being Taiwan, there will be further shifting. But, a) my logic may be way off, and b) I’m not sure what kind of price differential there is.
I’ve got pipes running through the walls and they’re bulging. I suspect many pipes are put in after the concrete has been poured. They just chisel out a path for the pipes but don’t consider the expansions due to heat.
The exact same thing happened to our living room a couple of weeks ago. I removed some of the pieces of broken tiles that made it hard to walk, covered everything with a layer of neoprene and then put a carpet on it. It’s not ideal, but it looks like most laopans who could handle this are busy until Chinese new year due to many people doing renovations.
We’ll look into fixing the floor later in February, we plan to use the wood-looking laminate.
A lot of older buildings (i.e. mine) are decommissioning the original pipes and running pipes externally from the roof down the back of the building. Saves a heap of money on redoing the pipes in the walls.
One technician proposed we do the same with the electric power lines in our home… landlady was not keen on that, but then she is against running gas on pipes, not tanks.
Laying down the laminate is easy, but removing all the floor is a no-go for me. Since we’ll have to hire some people to remove all the living room tiles (maybe 15 square meters?), I’d rather have them install the laminate so that if anything happens we can give them a polite phone call and say:“HEY YOU FUCKS, COME BACK HERE”.
Well, my original laminate -probably from 1950s- is crumbling apart so actually removing it is the easy part.
The part I am concerned about is the glue used to stick it to the floor. At best, it will have the neighbors flying high. At worst, it can kill us all.