Reflooring in a Gardenia
 

I'm thinking very seriously of changing the flooring in our Gardenia. It's a standard Gardenia, no stretches.
Basically, all of the areas that once had carpet have been switched to some sort of engineered flooring. We bought the house as a pre-owned, and the previous owner changed out the carpet for the current flooring. The tile areas are fine, but the living room/dining room area, as well as the bedrooms are darker than we like.

There is nothing wrong structurally with the current flooring, we are just looking to make a cosmetic transformation.

We do notice a lot of echoing, and from what I've read, certain types of flooring (not interested in returning to carpeting, thank you) reduce echoing compared to other choices.

I need a primer in the pros and cons of various products, and if you've done a Gardenia or Camellia relatively recently and wouldn't mind sharing your experiences ( including approximate costs if you don't mind), I'd appreciate the information.

Thanks

I will send you a private message

I understand that you don't wish to install carpeting. But, perhaps, you were going to have some rugs atop whatever flooring you do install? If so, I might recommend buying lighter-colored rugs now and seeing if they make enough difference for you before replacing flooring. Sometimes, a simple remedy like that actually makes all the difference.

In fact, you could buy them, bring them home and put in place to visually see what you think. Leave any tags, stickers on them and if it doesn't work, then you can return them. Lighter-colored bed and window coverings can also have a positive, overall impact.

I would suggest using the same flooring throughout the entire house. It will look better and increase the resale value.

Laker14, I have done something very similar in our Gardenia, I sent a Private message with my phone number, too much info to type this all out, so please give me a call.

Thanks, VT. I saw the PM. Was busy all day. Will try to call you tomorrow.

If you are taking out tile and installing wood, vinyl or laminate the demolition will be costly and a big mess. Have successfully installed luxury vinyl over tile. luxury vinyl planks, whole house (2,000 sq ft), installation and materials at $14 - $16k (no demolition of tile).

I agree with retiredguy but inside hers(wife) outside mine. We used Roberto's Flooring and have no complaints. Replaced entire house, except bedrooms, with luxury vinal and bedrooms had carpet replaced with best padding and a better carpet. Wife is happy, garage is all mine, life is good...lol

I think reflooring and making every room the same is a great idea. It will open up the space even more. I don’t understand why there are so many homes with different flooring in every room. It really dates the home.

I agree with putting luxury vinyl over existing floor. It's super thin and it'll save so much hassle for you, especially since you said you currently have engineered wood. That is not a floating floor, it is glued down. Pain in the butt to take out and scrape off all that glue.Who knows how your subfloor will be afterwards too. All the best with this project!

While I appreciate everyone's thoughts and ideas on this, I like having some of the floor tile and some wood. As far as the house looking dated, my plan is that by the time I or my heirs sell this place, anything I do will look dated.
Resale value is secondary to having what I want while I'm here. I'm not looking to flip this house in the next two years. I intend to be here until my old body can no longer use enough of what TV has to offer to make staying here worth the money. By that time, whatever I do now will be old, I hope.

I would recommend getting a primer from a reputable flooring company like Roberto’s. They know the floor plans in The Villages and can speak to you about the various materials, pros and cons. We lived in a gardenia also and the flooring was constantly moving/cracking- sounded like someone walking across the floor in the middle of the night!

It doesn’t matter what model home you have, it can be any home. Tile and wood floors are the best and the most expensive. Carpet in bedrooms is fine if you like warmth on your feet. If you want to go cheaper, you can get vinyl flooring and put it right over existing wood floors and it will look fine.
As for echoing, you’ll need some type of carpet or acoustic wall treatment to deaden the sound. I’m an audiophile and I use acoustic panels in my audio room to treat any echoing.
Use large area rugs with anti-slip padding, and I mean large like 8x10 or larger in each large area and it will make a difference

We had new hardwood floors installed in a Gardenia, livingroom/dining room, hallway only. This was due to a water pipe leak that came up thru the floor. Insurance paid most of the $17,000 bill. Living thru the removal of the original floor was tough. A forklift was driven around those rooms ripping up old floor. Then they had to sand off the old glue. Days of living with the noise and mess. Hopefully it's done differently now, this was five years ago.

14, I would talk to some Pro's.

Great Lakes in Wildwood are great.

Tell them you concerns/wishes and they can educate/recommend and price.

Good Luck.

sorry but it doesn't increase resale value it increases market attention

New Floors Sound Exciting
 

IMHO a floor just looks better if it’s continuous and the same. As far as sound, the floor gets some credit, but certainly not all the credit. Hard surface reverberations cause echo. Try soft surfaces on walls. Introduce larger plants, maybe a a large fabric cornice over your rear glass doors as well as large well padded throw rugs, these all should reduce the hard surface bouncing of sound waves. Many get large canvas paintings and they too can absorb the waves hitting your walls.

You know castles in Europe hang rugs and tapestries just to tackle your problem. I’m sure you are a bit more creative. Best of luck. I’m glad to see another enjoy our lives here in Sunny Florida.
:)

Floor
 

I redid entire floor of 2/2 courtyard villa last year. It’s far more elegant without the chopped up floors in the various rooms. I removed the tile from the kitchen and linoleum from the baths.

I used LVP with a commercial floor rating. Waterproof. Dog friendly. Easy to clean. Doesn’t scratch. Not noisy.

Great Lakes floors did mine. Best floor I’ve ever owned.

We removed carpet in living/dining room and replaced with a luxury vinyl. Mrs loved it so much we did same in master bedroom. Kept guest rooms carpeted. Call Roberto’s in Colony Plaza- they did the work and we are VERY satisfied! One day job.

If it’s the color of the engineered floor that bothers you, why not look into having your floors sanded and refinished in the color you like? It can be done.

We currently have the original tile in the common areas and bathrooms and engineered hardwood in the bedrooms (replacing the original carpet).

It may be possible, but I wouldn't recommend it, especially if you are doing it to just change the color. I once had hardwood floors refinished. It was very messy and dusty, and the final result was nowhere near as good as pre-finished flooring. One problem was dust "nibs" that settled on the polyurethane while it was drying. Also, I don't know how you would find an "expert" flooring refinisher in this area. In my opinion, the best thing to do is to remove and replace the flooring, and to consider paying extra for new baseboards and shoe molding.

This is good info to have, thanks. We are currently looking at houses and many have tile that is....less than ideal. I was wondering about viability of LVP over tile instead of demolition of tile. This gives me a base of info; much appreciated.

(apologies for side-barring the discussion)

We had LVP installed over tile a few months ago. Looks great and is so much easier to care for than tile and grout. We chose a fairly light shade to minimize visible dust and footprints. It always looks clean, and is very low maintenance. We did the whole house so the bedrooms had to have carpet removed and a subfloor (?) added to make those rooms level with the rest of the house. We wanted only one floor type throughout our home. It’s 2300 sq ft (4/3), and was about $20K because of the extra prep work in the bedrooms. The job took about 5 days, and was done by LA Flooring.

This discussion is interesting because in a previous house the homeowner installed flooring on top of the existing flooring, but not under any appliances. The new flooring was about 3/8 to 1/2 inch thick. All was fine until the dishwasher failed, then there was not sufficient vertical clearance to remove the unit without RAISING the countertop. My point double check that either the new flooring is installed UNDER all appliances or that there will be sufficient room to get these out if needed.

We have a stretched Gardenia. When we bought it, there were a total of 6 different types of flooring. Two types of tile, carpet, two types of engineered hardwood and LVP. We like one continuous type of flooring thru the entire house with the only possible exception was the tile already in the bathrooms.

We decided on LVP through out the entire house with exception of the two bathrooms. It would have been impossible to not demolish and remove the entire flooring down to the original concrete. Obviously, pulling carpet out gets you to the concrete level, but each type of flooring, tile, engineered hardwood and LVP were all different thickness so there would be no way for a smooth transition from each type of base without requiring transition strips.

Also a consideration that most people do not think about is if you demolish tile and replace with another material, you need to get a new material that is very close to the same thickness as the old tile and adhesive. If using a thinner floor type the baseboards can be lowered or a quarter round added but that does not help at the bottom of interior door jambs and trim around the jambs. Just something to consider.

Two years ago it took 5-1/2 days to demolish all the tile and remove all the old flooring and the complete install. Nasty, dusty job. If I remember the cost was about $17,000 but we also had all new 5-1/2 inch baseboard installed throughout the entire house. We got very good quality LVP with a commercial grade wear layer. The taller baseboard really looks good. There is no quarter round. Floormasters did out project.

We don't have any sort of echo in the house but we have a large 9 x 11 area rug in the living room. So far we don't have any scratches as the flooring is very durable. We like it in the kitchen and laundry because if there is ever a leak, which there will be some time, the floor will not be damaged like an engineered wood product. In fact, Floormasters recommended against engineered hardwood an any area where there is a possibility of water damage.

Flooring
 

We have a stretch Gardena and we refloored the entire home to porcelain tile, it is beautiful and gives our flooring a distinction from what comes with most homes. Please note that what is put down by the builders is still very nice. We used The Floor Shoppe on 301. VERY HAPPY!

Best Flooring
 

We bought a new and already built home in TV, but didn't want any carpet. The home had a very well done LVP and carpet in the 3 bedrooms. I asked the "builder" who did our floors and found them to be named Best Flooring. We also obtained bids from some of the other mentioned Flooring Contractors'. The Flooring used in our house is a pretty good grade and is not offered by most Contractors we talked to.

The reason I am posting is that Best Flooring was the only Contractor willing to meet our request of having a seamless installation with no sills to be used as transitions from existing LVP into the areas where the carpets were to be removed. Not only did they meet our requirements, they did an outstanding job at a decent price. No one would ever know there was carpet in this house unless I told you because of the seamless transitions. I recommend Best Flooring

We put in hardwood flooring in bedrooms and had tile in common areas. We used Royal Palm flooring in Summerfield (used by decorator who writes column in Daily Sun). They were competitively priced and did a great job. The light oak flooring pairs very well with the tiled areas. Have received many compliments!

Those are all good easy cheap suggestions that may just turn out to be acceptable solution for the poster, if nothing, nothing invested or lost !

We have a Begonia, sister to the Gardenia. We just finished tiling our lanai and putting new , wood flooring throughout the house excluding the bathrooms. We wanted all the same flooring throughout the house. The previous homeowners had put a very inexpensive LVF over all of the tile in the kitchen and hallways. It scratched very easily. There was carpeting in the living and dining rooms. After visiting several floor stores, we chose to go with The Floor Shoppe on 301. I am extremely happy with the attention to detail throughout this process. Ron our salesperson listened to what we wanted and helped us find just what we wanted.The team of professionals that did all of the instillation were extremely professional and cleaned as they went. All the furniture was moved by the crew carefully and covered in plastic and put back in place at the end. The cabinets and counters were covered in plastic as the tile was jack hammered out of the house. When all was done, a cleaning crew came in and cleaned the entire house. The price for all of this was 15K. This took 5 days to do but was well worth it.

That's tricky. I thought I could do that too in one of my condos but engineered wood veneer is thin. It's not recommended to sand and restain unless you know it's a thicker veneer. I chose not to do it.

I will add my 2 cents, we had carpet in the bedrooms, closets, and one hallway in our Gardenia, the rest was tile. We found a very nice Mohawk Luxury Vinyl Plank product at Lowe's. This 100% vinyl, and 100% waterproof, very flexible and very easy to install. You can trim it with a box cutter. When we talked to a few installers they were not interested in moving the furniture, and we literally did not have the room to store the furniture for several days. So this became a DIY project. Took me 2 weeks 2 to 4 hours per day and we did not have to empty the rooms. I simply did a 4 or 5 foot wide section of flooring and then moved furniture around to do the next section. I followed the instructions for cleaning the floor, and this new flooring is very quiet, you do NOT get any noise when walking on it.
The flooring we used is almost as quiet as carpet and is much warmer to walk on than tile. NOTE: if you decide to use this material do NOT install underlayment, PER THE MANUFACTURERS INSTRUCTIONS. Lowe's actual tried to sell me the underlayment, fortunately I looked into the installation instructions and saw the notice.
I saved a ton of money on this, almost $1000 on the underlayment, and probably twice that on installation. I also was able to do a custom threshold that is almost completely level with the tile, and I was able to complete the whole project without having to remove the 6-inch molding.

I like light-colored flooring in Florida homes. The Villages in my mind is a vacation spot where one relaxes, does fun things and enjoys the sunshine. It’s not Downton Abby or Buckingham Palace where dark flooring might be OK. This is just my opinion.

When we moved here seven years ago, the first thing I wanted to do to the pre-owned we bought was replace the wall-to-wall carpet and linoleum with light-colored ceramic tile. Whoops, a few months after we moved in my right knee started to hurt and after a couple operations and 18 months, I was back on my feet.

The flooring matter went to the back burner until last month when we decided it was time to replace the 20-year-old flooring. Last week we used LA Flooring of Wildwood to put down carpeting in the living room/dining area and bedrooms, and vinyl plank in the kitchen, foyer, and baths. 1,600 sq. ft. all for $11k. (We left the front bedroom, which we use as an office, as ceramic tile; we replaced this a few years ago when the roof leaked and ruined the carpet in that room, long story.)

We selected the lightest color we could find. LA Flooring did a fantastic job. They removed all kitchen/bathroom/washroom appliances such as oven, washer, dryer, toilets. Dismantled all furniture. All they did to the baseboard was paint, it looks great.

The reason we went back to wall-to-wall carpet is because during by knee rehab, the carpet felt so good on my knees when exercising. It feels sooo good today walking over it. Many have to put down throw rugs anyway or wear slippers all the time. It might hurt the resale value a little but it’s more important to get what you want and works for you now — we have no plans on moving anytime soon.

I appreciate your thoughtful and helpful comments in Talk of The Villages. I also have a Gardenia model home and would welcome your thoughts on replacing the flooring. Thank you!

Go to some flooring stores in the villages and ask those questions from the pro's