Lyndhurst Garden House

Lyndhurst Garden House
Lyndhurst Garden House

Wednesday, December 24, 2014

Grippy, but not too distresssed

I've ordered Armstrong Alvina Buff sheet flooring for the King's bath.  This is nice looking, not too distressed looking (not distressed at all actually--it could be brand new stone decking around a built-in hot tub, but made of slightly weathered stones), and yet looks (and actually feels) quite grippy.  It has variable texturing everywhere and the grout lines are noticeable and fairly dense.  At the same time, it's vinyl not stone, so is actually fairly smooth (despite the slight bumpiness on the order of a millimeter or two), and doesn't have hard edges you might hurt your feet on (if it were real stone decking).  It' has a nice amount of give to it for cushioning by design.  Padded smooth flooring with very slight and variable bumpy texturing for grippiness is perfect for a bathroom, I think.  And the colors go well with my Calacatta Porcelain shower, my Kohler Almond bath and toilet, my golden beige wall paint (same as in King's room) and black (for vanity and such).

I just don't get why people like tile floors.  They are cold, hard, and slippery usually.  The only reasonable way to do a bathroom tile floor is with very small tiles and a high proportion of grout lines.  Then you get at least some friction when wet.  But they're still cold and hard.  Hard floors are hard on feet, ankles, and ligaments--giving you heel spurs and the like.  I like to walk around the house in bare feet, and so I love padded flooring.  The master bathroom is the most important place for bare feet after the master bedroom, since even if I were to wear shoes elsewhere in the house, I'd still be barefoot mostly within the master suite while I'm getting bathed, dressed, or undressed.  Now it's true that within the shower itself it's a good idea to wear flip flops.  I do that mostly these days.  However there is always a time when one is putting on or off the flip flops when the floor could still be wet.  Preventing slipping is a very valuable floor feature.

I think people like tile because they believe it's easier to clean.  Or that it's permanent.  The permanence part may be true, though eventually everything will be replaced or refurbished (the tile in a vintage house might be saved but re-grouted after 100 years).   But nowadays other floors can last sufficient long that it barely matters anymore.  WRT cleaning, why is that so important?  Any good floor can be pretty easily cleaned, as long as you don't wait a few years to let the dirt bake in.  A monthly housekeeper can keep all the floors from getting baked in dirt, and I've gotten used to having a monthly housekeeper for that and other reasons--I wouldn't want to go back to not having one.

A quality vinyl floor can last 30 years or more.  My original bathroom floor probably had a 5 year warranty and is still OK after 31 years.  I'm only replacing it because it got torn during the new bathtub installation, and since a new toilet has yet to be installed, it's the perfect time to install a new floor.

With a tile floor, over the course of 30 years you might be looking at several "grout sealing" operations would would add up to the cost of a new vinyl floor, let alone the fact that the tile floor was a couple of times more expensive in the first place.  A new bathroom vinyl floor isn't actually very expensive.  And then you get the fun of choosing something entirely different in 15-30 years.  Or not.

I am only disappointed the Alvina Buff has the 15 year warranty instead of the 20, 25, or lifetime warranty.  But none of the longer warranty vinyls have as grippy looking a pattern.  Instead they often look like smooth large format tiles with deep distressing.  The grout lines are too far apart to be of much assistance and it's hard to tell from photos how much grippiness the deep distressing provides.  But they don't look as grippy, and I'm guessing and believing he look is accurate as the cause makes sense.  The higher warranty floors have thicker but also smoother wear layer.  A thicker layer can't make as much curvature, so less dense texturing is possible, and likely the grippiness is less too.  A layered flooring product has to bend the entire wear layer; you can't add layers on top for texturing because those might peel off.  The whole surface has to bend, and the thicker it is, the harder it is to bend or make bent.

The Alvina flooring has 10mm wear layer, as does the other most highly textured pattern Bleeker Street, Armstrong has two higher grades up to 20mm (the 20mm being very new to Armstrong), but those all look less textured, and the top line Congloleum I was interested in, but dismissed because it didn't look grippy, has a 20mm wear layer.

There was only one other pattern in the Armstrong catalog that looked possibly even more grippy is one with small squares, perhaps about 1 inch.  One example of this pattern is the Montauk which has an appropriate color G3A93.  Another example is Bleeker Street Uptown.  The density of the grout lines suggests this would be most grippy, maybe even more grippy than the Alvina.  But I don't find these patterns attractive.  When you zoom in on them, they are very distressed looking, as if they were snapshots of real sidewalks in some US city.  Not only is there mottling, there is some whitish stuff that looks a bit like baked on bird turds.

In principle vinyl flooring can be made to look like anything, pristine or distressed.  Why are almost all the patterns now distressed, and often horribly distressed like Montauk and Bleeker Street?

It was also hard to tell from the photos, but it looked a lot like the grout lines on these faux-street vinyls are raised instead of depressed.  That would have a tendency to trap water, possibly not good.  I can't tell from the pictures if that is actually true, and even if it is true, the raised grout lines would still have added traction, perhaps a lot of added traction.  But it was really the awful close up look that made me decide against them.  And they have the same 15 year warranty as the Alvina Buff that I'm getting.  Also the same floor technology, Fiberglass Masterworks Technology 3D with VTx.  That makes for a floor with good texturing, and therefore presumably good grip.  I think the fiberglass should be long lasting also, meaning the texturing will stay like new for a long time.  My old flooring had decent texturing originally but has gotten nearly flat.

I was unable to find any discussion online about the grippiness of vinyl floors.  AFAIK vinyl flooring has inherently more grip than typical ceramic or porcelain tile.  But it would still be nice to have numbers.  Ceramic and porcelain tile have a Wet Coefficient of Friction (wCOF) specification which is useful for comparison.  But an actual tile floor made out of such tiles would have a different effective grip depending on the spacing and thickness of grout lines.  The grout can be a much more important factor than the tile itself, and yet nowhere do you get an "overall" rating of a particular tile/tile-size/grout with regards to grip.  Even a coefficient of friction alone is not a sufficient way of describing an actual floor, because the wCOF varies according to position, and not all patterns of such wCOF variation are equally useful in preventing slip, which is a complex and dynamic process.  My own sense is that although vinyl floors don't have the highly varying COF and level of real tile floors, vinyl texturing is more important than you might think if your thinking is based on static calculations.  As one is gaining traction, the smallest textured point can be taken advantage of with transient downward force.  On my old vinyl floors, I think they would be useless without their fairly dense texturing.

Really you need something more like real world testing, though I'm not suggesting inducing actual slips.  Some kind of synthetic test…or just subjective feel objectively recorded, might be the best we can do.  I was thinking about measuring the distance of slip with a footlike object after the floor is evenly sprinkled with a coating of water.  Not just one measurement, but an very large number in random locations and directions.  From which an "average slip" would be computed.  But a complicating factor is that it would vary according to weight a lot.  So one would have to do the test with a range of different weights also.  And then not just "slip direction" but also a random "direction of force".  And then variation of force.  Ultimately you might need to do a gazillion measurements.

The random pattern of Armstrong Alvina (with random relatively dense grout lines and varying stone look textures) flooring suggests to me it would do well with a hypothetical random slip test.  Other tiles which simulate large format stone tiles--a very popular theme in the most expensive vinyl flooring--might not do so well, because in anything like a linear direction you slip a long way to the first grout line.

Deciding on the Alvina pattern was difficult, because I had to defend it in my own mind against a more classical bathroom flooring pattern, or at least what is seen a lot now, using large format stone or porcelain tile pattern.  It was also easier to find those faux large stone patterns in compatible colors.  My favorite among the large stone patterns (and actually my favorite looking tile of all) is Congoleum's Berlin Oyster Bar.  They show it in a bathroom scene which looks elegant and totally gorgeous.  It has a lifetime warranty, a thick wear layer with aluminum oxide, and silver for microbial action.  This is a top line vinyl (the Armstrong Alvina is only midline), it looks great, it works with my colors obviously (it was not so obvious with the Alvina Buff, I had hopes, but all the same it wasn't clear if it had too much orange or not…now I believe after studying many pictures and print outs right next to the tile that it does not).

But THE thing which killed the Berlin Oyster Bar was my concern about how grippy it is.  For starters,  an actual stone tile floor like that would not be very grippy at all, or certainly not when new anyway.  It has the highly distressed look (which in this case I find OK because of the cool and random coloration) which suggests some added grip over a brand new stone floor.  But maybe not much.  And the grout lines are of no help at all being so widely spaced.

Too bad, I suppose, that I didn't have time to test a sample of the Congoleum.  But I felt that even if the distressed stone has a texture like sandpaper, when wet it wouldn't help much.  Though possibly, in actual use, the Congoleum would do fine because of the cushioning.  This is in their Air Step Vibe series which should have impressive cushioning (though I don't really know how it compares with the various Armstrong vinyls).  That cushioning adds grip, but it's hard to know how much without testing.

There were many other top line stone look vinyls made by Armstrong and Congoleum that might have worked.  Distressed stone look is the most popular pattern in the most expensive vinyls, and the lightest color of every pattern had a chance of working with my Calacatta shower tile.  Among all I saw (and I tried to look at the full catalogs) the Berlin Oyster Bar had the best look and coloration.  But I worried that none of them would have sufficient grip.

I'd buy the vinyl with a longer warranty if I could mainly because it would likely wear better over time.  Actually collecting on a vinyl flooring warranty is another matter, probably not worth losing any sleep due to being stuck with shorter warranty.  Usually most vinyl floors are replaced not because of "ordinary wear" (as would be covered but likely pro-rated in most warranties) but because of an adverse rip or tear (as just happened during the bathtub installation) which would not be covered anyway.

Now it's not surprising that a random grippier pattern might not wear as well anyway.  But it also appears that because of being a midline tile, the Armstrong Alvina Buff has a thinner wear layer.  Now it's also possible that a thicker wear layer might be too difficult or costly with the grippier pattern.  In examining both Armstrong and Congoleum catalogs, I found no exceptions, in all cases the vinyls with the grippiest patterns were not available in the longest warranties, and the patterns with the longest warranties were either large format stone or wood, neither of which looked very grippy.

It was very hard to tell this from on screen photos, which are hard to compare.  But printing out both the Berlin Oyster Bar and the Alvina Buff showed them both to have compatible colors with my bathroom, with the Alvina being just a bit less good for the Calacatta but better on everything else, and also favoring the general golden tone (the Oyster Bar coloration has some useless-to-me blue in it and only weakly accepts black and gold tones).  So actually, from what I've seen in prints, I like the Alvina Buff coloration better, a little, in my bathroom.  But I do worry that the actual flooring may have more orange.  It already pushes the limit a bit on that (Orange and Calacatta don't go that well--and my Kohler Almond already pushes that to the limit also), but harmonizes with calacatta due to random elements with white/black/purple.  The Berlin Oyster Bar never pushes the orange problem in the first place, but only weakly accepts black.

I quipped above that when one ultimately does replace a vinyl floor, it's an opportunity to try something different, or not to try something different.  Well actually I love the pattern of my existing vinyl floors in kitchen and both bathrooms.  The pattern is of 1.5 inch hexagon tiles with slight distressing and wide grout lines.  I don't know how the floors were originally (my mother and I bought the house when it was already 8 years old and noticeably abused) but even now they have some grip…and it is largely because of the close spaced faux grout lines.

Now even if I could get an exact replacement for the bathroom vinyl, I wouldn't buy it because the color is not quite right for the Calacatta.  I was planning on living with the mismatch (until it became clear I'd need to replace the floor) but it wouldn't be worth repeating giving the new shower tile.  The color is too yellow/orange for the calacatta.

But what might have been cool would have been a similar hex tile with gold veined calacatta.  I've seen real gold calacatta in hex matrix for sale.  That would be cool but high maintenance.

But I am puzzled why the basic hex tile pattern seems to have completely disappeared from both the Armstrong and Congoleum catalogs.  It is a grippy yet elegant pattern with infinite variations possible in color and distressing.  Has it become too 1980's?  To me it seems like a timeless pattern, and if it had been available in a grippy top line vinyl I might  have preferred that to the random Alvina--which has a kind of casual mountain lodge or vacation spa look which maybe I will get more used to but wasn't really something I had been seeking.

In my mind, though, I've created this image where my bathroom door is really the gateway to The Spa. The highlight in the Spa is the Shower/Bath.  Though the Shower Bath is an elegant classical structure, the floor that leads there is modern casual.  Welcome to my eclectic palace (and this is hardly the exception)!







Saturday, December 20, 2014

Bathroom Flooring

Bathtub installation tore the flooring near the door.  Also, the toilet is being replaced.  The only reason not to do the flooring at this point is that I'm not not not replacing the vanity, and a future vanity will likely be smaller.

I want vinyl.  Vinyl sheet seems better to me than plank flooring for bathroom, despite the assurances from plank flooring people that it's great for bathrooms.

The best Armstrong I've seen is Milan  in the darker X4A18 color.  The white color might be better for bathroom, though, but I don't really like the white, so I'd choose the X4A18.

The Best Congoleum I've seen is Panning for Gold.  It bugs me, though, that the virtual tiles are too large.  I think bathroom should have the smallest faux tile pattern possible for better handling of shower splash water.

So I'm choosing the Armstrong Milan tonight.

Wednesday, December 17, 2014

Fixing the missing insulation under the new tub

Tub work is now entering 3rd day.  On the first day, the tile demolition team arrived at 9:30am and were done by 10:15.  They removed all the old tile, but left the sheetrock just above the tile.  I called Carrillo and they said that was OK.  Considering the mess that must have been made, they left everything amazingly clean afterwards.  The old fiberglass insulation was looking somewhat rotten in places, but I doubted it would make much difference.  I spent much time thinking how the niche was going to be installed in the somewhat off-centered and peculiar space in the side wall, but in the end decided it would just be a bit off-center and my plan (as of Sunday night, when I had previously emailed Naomi) was still good, that is for 12" wide nice that's 28" high with shelf in the middle.  (Naomi said the shelf would be made of the tile itself, so no trouble with color matching.)

On the second day, plumbers arrived around 9:30, took a one hour break around noon, and left around 4:45.  They removed the tub and toilet and installed the new valves and water lines connecting to the spray head and spout.  They had quickly sealed the existing water pipes (1/2 copper) with caps in the morning so I can't even remember how short the water was off.  They dug out the tar in the tub drain and put new drain into place and aligned it to tub (by lowering tub a few times).  They soldered in the new toilet flange (the old one had been merely crimped on, not soldered, so no wonder the toilet had often felt loose).  When they left there was still a smell of flux in the air, but I left doors open to the garage and my efficient ventilation system took care of it quickly.

Around 6:00 my friend took a look.  She was appalled at the appearance of the old insulation.  She asked me if they were going to fix that.  I said that nobody had said anything about it, and the plumbers surely weren't going to replace it.  Since I was not doing this project through a general contractor or builder, just a plumber and tile company, I didn't think there was anyone to fix the insulation.

Looking some more, I also realized there was a missing piece under the tub near the front of the tub, actually in the plumbing drain void in the house…a particularly bad spot for missing insulation.  Cold air leaking in through there would reach all under the tub and the bathroom and kitchen walls, and perhaps even deeper into the house.  I remembered later how this piece got missing--it was my fault!  When my mother and I bought this house in 1992, it had been badly treated.  There were openings behind where a refrigerator would go.  (I didn't learn until later that these openings are often needed for plumbing and extermination work.)  The bottom opening, wide open, had a large ant mound inside.  I dug out the ant mound, and then I started pulling on something that seemed like fibrous garbage.  Before I could see what I was doing I had pulled out an old rotten piece of fiberglass.  There wasn't any way to push it back in from there.  I soon forgot about that amidst all the repainting and minor repairs.  The first handyman we hired plugged up the holes with with sheetrock.

In the years since, I always wondered why the bathtub seemed so much colder than the bathroom itself on cold days.  Cold air seemed to be coming from somewhere.  The tile around the tub also seemed especially cold.  The lack of insulation in this critical part of the house could even have caused the deterioration in the tile itself (though, shower water leaking through increasingly large cracks could also explain it).

I never would have thought that underneath the bathtub the wall wouldn't even be finished, making the insulation there even more important.

Around 7:45 PM I went to Home Depot and selected R13 insulation (I picked the nicest looking roll, many were half open, stained, etc), a stapler and staples (I had only recently discovered my old Arrow T50 was broken), a dust mask, and a pair of garden shears and a new pair of gloves.  Though the correct way to cut fiberglass is somewhat involved (you are supposed to cut with on a scrap piece of plywood) an easy way is with garden shears, as I had just read online, and I had just one piece to cut, 13 inches long.

After Home Depot I went grocery shopping and got home around 9:45.  I watched a short video on how to (mostly how not to) install fiberglass insulation.  Sometime around 11 I started working on replacing the fiberglass piece and I was finished around 1:30AM.  I put towels around the work area and cleaned out the weeds that had grown into the void and some bits of old insulation.  Putting on mask and gloves, I removed the roll of R13 from the car and cut off the plastic cover with regular scissors.  I marked 12.5 inches with scissor cuts then cut somewhat crudely, intending to fill the gap below with a second piece.  I took the piece and pushed it into place.  Well I had failed to notice that there was a gap above the piece, so it was more than 1/2" short.  I pushed up a little hoping to push the piece into the upper gap, but that didn't work very well.

This was where it started to get complicated and difficult.  It was hard to cut a very short piece that was very straight, and where the fiberglass was cut to the same length as the paper backing.  Mostly it wasn't.  Finally I filled the bottom with several pieces, and some extra paper where the paper backing had come off.  Then I noticed that the far side was short too.  For some reason the spacing for this inner void was actually wider than the normal 14.5 inches between studs.  So I cut some pieces to fill that.

Here I had an idea which goes beyond typical construction (not that my actual work does).  It occurs to me that I want all open airspaces like this void to have paper in front of the fiberglass.  The paper protects the airspace from fiberglass breaking off and going into the air stream.

When I had pushed the pieces into the far side of the gap (which was also hard to reach) it left a big piece of visible fiberglass.  I fiddled with this for the longest time.  Finally I decided simply to cut off a new piece of paper (with fiberglass on it) and press it over the exposed pink.  I did similar work on the near side where there was visible fiberglass after stuffing another piece underneath.  All this extra fiddling was at least an hour's work and I even had to take a break to wipe of perspiration.  I also tried to stuff a bit of insulation into the gap above the piece, behind a horizontal 2x4, but that didn't work well and I gave up easily.  It was hard to work in such a tight space, being careful not to touch any of the new plumbing.

By code, I didn't do a great job, maybe not even passible.  But by my standard, I at least did get all the visible fiberglass covered with paper.  And the insulation work, if not great, is at least far better than nothing.  I may have squeezed too much fiberglass in the far side, but not enough in the gap up above the main piece, and I think those were the biggest technical weaknesses.  I continued looking for awhile and took pictures.  I was thinking I could already notice the difference in warmth and lesser transmission of noise from the refrigerator.  That was probably just my imagination.  WRT the noise, it now seemed to be coming from the ceiling instead of from lower down.

Even though the energy savings will probably never be as great as the cost, I think it will be nice for the bathtub not to be so cold in the future.  My version of construction goes like this.  I get the best professionals I know to do the big jobs, then I do little bits of detail work, sort of like extra hot rodding.  That's because making my home is art, not genius.  I once got a fortune cookie which said "Art does what it can, Genius does what it must."  On my home, I do everything I can to make it nicer.

I emailed the tile company about the ratty looking fiberglass above the tub, and they said they would fix that when they come out to do the tile on Thursday.


Tuesday, December 16, 2014

Shower Arm Mount

The plumbing company had identified the hose required for the new handheld shower spray, but not the shower arm mount for it.  I looked for that and found it, available in Delta stainless: U3401-SS-PK.

Saturday, December 13, 2014

Bath Shower Heights

Soap Dish: 27 inches from floor to bottom of fixture (soap rests 1 inch higher), and 6 inches off center toward the back of tub (left).  This is a "compromise" bath/shower height, higher than my original (and all my life) of about 23 inches.  At 27 inches I can grab the soap without the least bending.  Yet it is still easy to reach in the tub, and fits neatly below the grab bar at 36 inches from finished floor.  I also had to consider interference between grab bar and soap dish, which is no problem at 27 inches but would be at 32.  But then 32 would overlap the grab bar for the top art of the soap tray.  It seems the soap tray designers got the minimum height, at about 5 inches, built in.  Minimum for 5" high soap dish would be 31 inches.  Still 27 gives more comfortable clearance than 31 would, and is an excellent overall height.  Standard call for showers having soap dish mounted high--above 48 inches, but that doesn't work for bath shower, and I've never liked high soap dishes for some reason.  I find it nice to plop the soap down lower.  But to further remove the dish from shower spray, just enough backward positioning.  Don't want it too far back to be inconvenient.

7 inches off-center, towards the back, seems to reject shower spray sufficiently in the Queens's bath.  (Actually, I live with the current one in far worse position, but the spray is usually narrow.)  7 inches back is not at all inconvenient, though convenience does diminish as you go further back.  8 inches possibly being a tad less convenient, but it would work also.

Shower Outlet (pipe on center): 78 inches, three inches higher than current 75.  Higher than 78, and it gets tougher for me (and worse Noelia) to work the arm diverter.  Tall people in my shower can use the fine handheld with almost 7 foot high head when attached to arm.  Current 75 barely clears my head by about 3 inches with big diverter and tall head, so it needs to be more.  (I've read current average construction is 80 inches, custom construction usually 84.)  I'm 5' 6.5", and I don't ever intend to sell this home.  Old code minimum, which was virtually standard before the 1970's, was 72 inches.

Niche: 44 inches high (or slightly lower) from floor and 28 inch high niche, divided into two parts with a shelf, meaning 13.5 inches high storage top and bottom.  14 inch is a good size for large bottles, even my largest are actually 10 but that means 12 would be about minimum.  Niche heights seem to go in 14 inch increments, 14, 28, etc.  44 inches puts shelf upper around 59 which is an easy reach, even for short person.

Shower valve (pipe on center): 47 inches the standard 48 inches seems just fine, especially for the Lahara control whose control action for velocity is a few inches below center.

Spout: bottom of spout has to be 4 inches from flood level of bath, probably 5-6 inches from tub to center of pipe, or 20-21 inches from floor.  (Tub is 14 7/8 inches high.)

Bath valve: 27 inches.  (

5.5/27 is what it is now.  No reason to change unless necessary for code, it seems right on target.


Sunday, December 7, 2014

Separate Bath and Shower Mixing Valves

My latest idea, as I just posted to Terry Love's Blog:

I am really liking separate valves for tub and shower and hoping I can get the plumber to do it. Especially with a valve like Delta 1700, my plumber's favorite, it can't be too low when you're taking a shower because you have to reach underneath the center of control to control the all important volume, so mounting it below 48 inches on center is lousy when your taking a shower, but obviously makes the valve unreachable if you're taking a bath.

AND, I think a Moentrol single handle V/T control (it appears no one else makes a control like this anymore) makes the best sense for a tub. My plumber seems not to like this valve and strongly prefer Delta. But let me explain why the Moentrol is perfect for bathtub. During one bathing session, you may need to adjust the volume and temperature in many different ways. You start out full force hot or nearly so. Then if you overshoot, you run colder water for awhile at some intermediate volume. Then you run a trickle hot during the bath itself. If it gets too hot you may need another blast of medium cold, and so on. A single handle valve is perfect for making all these changes on the fly, even if it doesn't allow finer control of pressure, and the "memory" aspect of temperature control isn't that great.

OTOH, the 1700 with dual handles is perfect for a shower. For a shower, and for especially for one person, you basically can set the temperature control once and forget it. Just turn on and off and up and down the volume as needed with the larger volume handle.

So this gives another reason for having dual valves. The temperature dynamics are completely different. For shower you just want constant temperature, for bath you need to vary the temperature all over the place. And if you take a bath, you need to remember to re-set the temperature next time you take a shower. And it might be good to have different kinds of controls as well, with dual handle control for shower and single handle for bath, as I have just described.

Finally, there's a third good reason for separate mixing valves. No surprises. This is especially true with spout type diverter. I can't count the number of times I've pulled the spout diverter and it doesn't go as expected--wrong spray head selected, wrong spray option, too much pressure, etc. If you have a fixed control (or another kind of diverter) you don't get those kinds of surprises. You just ramp up the volume from zero. But even with an in-wall diverter, you can still have the surprises coming from forgetting to check which way the diverter is turned.