Montclair Kitchen, 2016

This Montclair home was getting ready for market. The owner was preparing to sell and move, and wanted the kitchen floor to help the house sell. She had already chosen the tile: a striated Italian 12″ x 24″ with a very high durability rating, the kind of floor that looks expensive and holds up to years of traffic. The kitchen was roughly 200 square feet, with an angled entry and an island in the middle of it.

What was under the linoleum

The existing floor was linoleum. Underneath it, believe it or not, was a floated mortar bed. That isn’t how the book says to do it, but it had advantages: the floor was rock-solid, watertight, and didn’t flex at all. It also cut noise to the floor below. The trade-off was height, which is why both entrances already had wide thresholds.

Demolishing it would have been a huge job. Breaking out linoleum bonded to a mortar bed means days of noise, dust and debris, plus the cost of rebuilding a flat substrate afterward. And for what? The floor underneath was already doing everything a tile substrate needs to do.

Going over it instead

So we made a decision: tile over it. The industry standard is to remove resilient flooring before tiling, and for good reason, because most of it flexes or is poorly bonded. This floor was the exception: fully bonded, rigid, and sitting on mortar. The surface was cleaned, and the tile was set in a bonding mortar formulated to grip non-porous surfaces like this one. As with every tile job, each tile back was cleaned before setting, and the mortar color was chosen close to the grout so nothing shows through at the joints.

Large-format tile leaves no room for a wavy floor, and a 24-inch plank shows every high spot. The island was the tricky part: every cut around it had to be measured and made precisely on the wet saw and grinder, so the pattern stayed continuous right around it.

The result

The new floor sits about a half inch above the wood planks in the adjacent rooms, and you can see it at the two thresholds, where transition pieces carry the step. That was the only cost of skipping the demolition.

By our estimate, the new floor easily added $20,000 in value to the home. It cost the owner about $4,000. This is a good example of thinking outside the box: the best result isn’t always the one that follows the most expensive path.

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SEO title: Montclair Kitchen Tile Floor Over Existing Floor | Oakland 2016
Meta description: A striated Italian 12×24 tile floor set over a rock-solid existing floor in a Montclair kitchen, skipping a huge demolition. About $4,000 for the owner, and by our estimate $20,000+ in added value.
Focus keyphrase: kitchen tile floor Oakland

Two details to confirm:

• The layout: the original post says “a diagonal entryway around an island.” I wrote it as an angled entry plus an island. Tell me if the tile itself was laid on the diagonal.
• Transition pieces: I said transition pieces carry the half-inch step at the thresholds. If you used something else there, tell me what and I’ll fix it.