See my cute little boy below? This is a picture I would have never sent to anyone.
Why?
Because of the stained flooring.
When we first bought this apartment, I noticed that around the perimeter of the main area the edges of the flooring was grungy looking. After scrubbing repeatedly with an assortment of scrubbers and chemicals, it was clear that the problem wasn’t built-in dirt, but that chemicals inappropriate to the floor had been used for cleaning that ate away the top layer and allowed stains to set in.
You know how they say when you live with something all the time, you get used to it and stop seeing it? Not me. I’m a very visual person, and I’ve never gotten used to this. The entrance (pictured above) is the very worst; fortunately that’s a small area and the other areas were much less damaged but there was still a light gray stain extending about an inch from the wall all around the room that gave an unclean impression.
I’ve been thinking for quite a while about retiling the floors, but that’s expensive if you hire someone to do it. All my older kids who can do this kind of work are out of the house and I didn’t have the time to personally take on a project of this scope.
Finally about six weeks ago, I decided I’d do the retiling myself. I visited the tile store several times, measured the rooms, and my final step before placing my tile order was to get a quote to shorten my front door to accommodate the change in floor height. When the guy came to give me a quote, he was surprised to see my flooring – he said the tiles are very nice and it didn’t make sense to retile with ceramic tiles when I have higher quality flooring already in place. I told him that I don’t want to see the dirty-looking tiles anymore.
He informed me that there are professionals who deal with these issues. I was delighted to hear that! While I didn’t mind doing the tiling, I knew that it would be a massive project to take on while needing to live in the space being retiled. I called a couple of floor professionals in for quotes, and a few days later – on erev Chanukah – a crew came to restore my floor.
For just a thousand shekels, my floor now looks like new! Paying someone to do this job saved me three thousand shekels in tiling materials and countless hours of work.
It’s amazing to me that for $250 dollars I could so easily take care of this longstanding issue within a few hours. It’s so nice to look around and now the floor looks clean when it’s clean!
Avivah
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