Tile in West Linn, OR

Yes — stairs and trim are one of our seven services, and in a hillside town like West Linn they come up on most jobs. Treads, risers, nosings and the transition at each landing get quoted as their own line, so you can see what that part of the job actually costs.

Not necessarily, but it should be a decision rather than an accident. In a split-level or daylight-basement home you see two levels at once from the stairs, so color and plank direction want planning together. Carpet on the stairs with hard flooring above and below is a common and good-looking answer, and it is quieter.

Generally not, and it is better to say so up front. We do not take on repair work for hard surface flooring, tile or countertops on projects we did not install. With a shower the reason is specific: the waterproofing is buried behind the tile, we cannot inspect it, and patching the visible part of a system that may already have failed does you no favours. If we built it, that is a different conversation.

No, and this is the most common misunderstanding about showers. Grout is a filler between tiles and it lets water through. Sealing it helps with staining and slows things down, but the thing actually keeping water out of your wall is the membrane and pan behind the tile. That is why we spend the time there rather than on the part you can see.

Longer than people expect, because the sequence has waiting in it — the waterproofing has to cure before tile goes on, and the setting mortar has to cure before grouting. Rushing any of those stages is how failures start. We will give you a realistic schedule at the estimate, including the days when nothing appears to be happening.

On the walls, easily. On a shower floor it is more constrained, because the floor has to fall to the drain and a large rigid tile cannot follow a slope in two directions without help. Smaller formats or a mosaic conform to the fall naturally, which is why you see them on shower floors so often. We will show you what works with the pan we are building.