Tile in Woodburn, OR

Luxury vinyl plank, with the wear layer chosen for the traffic rather than the sticker price. It handles claws, spills and dragged furniture, it does not stain the way carpet does, and if a plank is ever badly damaged it can be swapped. We would keep carpet for bedrooms, where it is genuinely nicer to live with.

The opposite. Woodburn gets about 42 inches of rain a year, and that water walks in on shoes. A hard surface at the entry and through the traffic path is far easier to keep than carpet, which holds whatever comes in off the street. What actually matters in a wet climate is the installation — proper acclimation and expansion gaps, so seasonal movement never shows.

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.