Marmoleum vs. tile floor in bathroom
I have been flirting with Mannington Adura Max Apex luxury vinyl flooring for my place – I currently have hex tile and it is just a grout nightmare (never again!). Some of the wood look tile is starting to look really nice as well – and you could put radiant floor mats underneath as with the hex tile. Basically I am not a fan of hex tile so anything else is a win for me.
dorkofwindsor
in General Discussion 5 years and 9 months ago
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cate | 5 years and 9 months ago
We would like to change the flooring in our bathroom. It is currently sheet vinyl over a wood subfloor. We are considering Marmoleum or unglazed porcelain hex tile. Which do people prefer aesthetically? Our bathroom is close to the original, with a clawfoot tub, bead board walls, and wall hung sink. Also, would a proper tile installation remove the wood subfloor? If anyone has done this, did you experience any movement of the house structure, at least until the new tile floor was installed?
NeoGrec | 5 years and 9 months ago
Personally, I love marmoleum. It’s a great look, comes in wonderful colors, is easy to maintain and warm and comfortable under foot. I’m guessing if you go with tile, you’d need to replace the original subfloor with plywood because it’s more stable and can be installed absolutely flat — important for making sure the tiles don’t crack. But to your point, our tile floor cracked when we installed it too soon after removing a load bearing wall below the bathroom. We put in a beam and lally post so everything was fine structurally. We just didn’t wait long enough for the settling to end. However I’m not sure removing a subfloor would be a radical enough change to cause movement.
Townie | 5 years and 9 months ago
Have you lifted the vinyl up yet to see what the subfloor is exactly? Old house original tongue and groove pine flooring or new construction plywood? I’m going to say old house which means you will still need to place something between the subfloor and the Forbo or else the imperfections will see-through. If plywood then no problem.
I would say there are so many possibilities aesthetically in both choices. Forbo is green and self-healing to some extent. It won’t require you to make any drastic height changes that could require plumbing fixtures to be adjusted the way a tile floor would. Marmoleum has many different products. I think the sheet version has to be installed by certified workers for guarantee. Iv seen Forbo in kitchens that looks pretty f’n nice with all the seems welded so one continuous surface of color. It smells good too.
hkapstein | 5 years and 9 months ago
I see no reason you can’t install tile over your existing subfloor, the main reason to remove would be to limit the transition height to the next room. That’s because you’ll mostly likely be putting down a new substrate to tile on. However there are a variety of approaches you can discuss with your contractor. My main consideration would be the deflection tolerance of the joists. If the structure can move more than is recommended for the tile you select, I would think twice about tiling, or explore reinforcing the floor. If the floor can move, the grout will be coming out all the time, the tiles may crack, and it will be a real headache.
If the sheet vinyl is asbestos containing, that might be another reason to consider using something you can put over it instead of demolishing.
Aesthetically, I think it really depends on the execution. Tile could look like the basement from Saw, and linoleum could look like a high school hallway. My guess would be that tile will in general, off a better appearance, performance, and service life , and that is why it’s around despite the cheaper and simpler alternatives, but linoleum is a very nice material, and I think if you can make that work in your bathroom, it will give you a less common feature that will offer your house an interesting look and feel that most others don’t have.
2345bcde | 5 years and 9 months ago
Cate, the thing to do is remove the fixtures, pull up the existing floor including the subfloor. If you have access to a laser you can go from the high point in the room and sister 2×6’s to the existing floor joists leveling the floor going off the high point in the room. Lay down a new 3/4 inch subfloor. Put down a 1/4 bed of thin set screw door a 1/4 layer of wonder board. You tape the seems with mesh tape and thin set. Allow the seems to dry and cost with red guard. The floor will be solid as a rock and you’ll have zero problems with leaks. You’ll have a level sound floor.
cate | 5 years and 9 months ago
Thank you so much everyone, this is incredibly helpful. You have all raised excellent points I would not have considered. Thank you!
brokelin | 5 years and 9 months ago
I also love linoleum – but find there are many who don’t know it is a different product than vinyl (I’m old enough to have grown up with real linoleum, so I’ve always known the difference.) There are others who think tile is the only way to go, and don’t like either vinyl or linoleum – but if resale isn’t your concern, this won’t matter to you. (And even if resale in the future is a factor, consider that many of those buyers will want to completely renovate a bathroom with a clawfoot tub and wall-hung sink, so don’t worry about the floor you choose for resale – I like old bathrooms best, so that isn’t a judgment.)
I also like small, unglazed tiles on bathroom floors. (Though I’m odd in that I prefer almost any other small shape – squares or rectangles, laid in any pattern – to hexagrams – I only dislike round penny tiles more than hex.) The thing I hate to see when people use small tiles is that often you can see where one sheet of tile ends and another begins, due to people not being incredibly careful when laying the sheets of tile, even when laid by professionals . I hate seeing that – often you can even see it in small after phots on a computer, not just in a close, in-person viewing. I don’t remember ever seeing that in the old floors – maybe they didn’t used to come attached to backing in sheets – or maybe professional tile setters took more pride in their work, I don’t know. It would bug me to have small tiles that were installed that way, and I see it in so many photos. I think I might use larger tiles if I laid a tile floor just to avoid that risk!
I do find tile floors cold in winter, and tend to cover a lot of them with small cotton rugs anyway. If I was laying a tile floor in a bathroom, I would definitely look into the possibility of installing heating under the floor – I haven’t experienced it, not even as a guest, but people who have it rave about it.
I also hate scrubbing all the grout with that small tile, and do it infrequently, so keeping them mostly covered helps with the dirt that gets ground into the grout, whether the floors are new or 100 years old. I don’t think I’d feel the need for rugs with linoleum that I chose and liked to look at – just a bathmat. I do like the small tiles underfoot for prevention of slipping – all that grout is the best slip prevention there is – and I seem to remember that a linoleum bathroom floor that has water on it from wet feet is really slippery – but I’m thinking back to my childhood to remember that.
I don’t like the hardness of tile underfoot, but I can tolerate it fine in a bathroom, where I don’t spend as much time standing on it as I do in a kitchen. But I don’t like that I can’t use a glass drinking glass or ceramic vase in a tiled bathroom, as I always manage to have them shatter on the tile – another benefit of softer floors.
It seems from the earlier comments that you can install either without problem, but that you may need to do more costly preparation first for tile to be sure it will stay put. Go with what you like best, depending also on what you want to spend. I know that real linoleum is costly, especially in sheets, which is the only way to go in a bathroom, in my opinion, (not square tiles of it, to be sure of no water seeping into the cracks between squares), and that it is recommended that it be laid by a professional when using sheets of it, though I wonder if that is as essential when laying it in a small room.
brokelin | 5 years and 9 months ago
Also wanted to add, in my experience, when you have a clawfoot tub (whether it is also your shower or not), slip prevention needs to be taken even more seriously, as you actually have to climb into and out of them.
I have friends who used a larger tile with some sort of grooves in it when redoing their bathroom (that I’ve never seen elsewhere, so I can’t tell you what it is) that seems to be perfect for slip prevention.