Be Careful What You Wish For

Arizona
On the Way to Tahoe

For over a year I have been bemoaning the state of the yellowy-almond colored rug that covered the living area of our coach. It was nice on the toes, but it collected every bit of dust, mud, food spillage, dog tossup, and hair from at least one of the two humans and the canine that collectively live here. At least three times a week I’d have to vacuum, then clean the clogged vacuum, poking at the dog hair and detritus it had just inhaled. And it fit absolutely nowhere, so it was relegated to a corner in the bedroom where it sat, quietly turning us into asthmatics. At least twice a month, I’d be down on my hands and knees with the scrub brush and the bottle of rug shampoo. And for this I’d retired?

We came to a collective decision, although I can’t really speak for the dog, that the rug had to go. It was too dirty, too smelly, and way too much work. So we (I) set about finding the perfect flooring.

It didn’t take long to find my heart’s desire. At a recent convention of motor coaches, there among the many shining examples of coachly indulgence, sat a brand-new 2009 Beaver Coach with a BLACK GRANITE FLOOR! Oh did that shine. Oh did that look elegant! Oh this was the floor for me.

Never mind that the coach was a super suspension, designed to pull much more aggregate weight than my 2004 model. Never mind that granite is one of the heaviest of flooring materials. My sense of the rightness of that floor was set in stone. Unintentional pun.

At this self-same convention, I also walked the exhibit hall and met quite a few converters (RV renovators) who all had the same answer for me: impossible. Your tires will pop. Here, try this nice 1950’s style vinyl tile. It’s easy to keep clean.

I turned and fled that negativity. I was undeterred.

There were other naysayers. People with beige floors, people with rugs, people with envy for my decision. It’ll never be clean, they’d say. It’ll show every dog hair, they’d moan. You’ll be cleaning it constantly, they’d squawk. I’ll do the work, I promised myself, and besides, they don’t know how hard it was keeping that rug clean. Only one woman, forever after my new best friend, thought it was a cool idea. She hates her rug too.

Now here was the problem. I could get very light granite. It was made in Italy, split into thin sheets, cut into nice-size tiles and backed with a kind of foamcore. It needed special adhesive, a special underflooring and might scratch when the slides were rolled closed. And it would cost $24,000. For a floor the size of, oh ,say 240 sq ft. That works out to $100 a square foot, I believe. John, cranky old skinflint that he is, would not go along with this plan.

Would I have acceded to this madness if he hadn’t put his manly clodhopper down on my dainty little toes? I live in this thing, don’t I? Okay, I can’t lie. Of course I wouldn’t have.

So after ascertaining that my number two choice, porcelain, was just as damnably heavy, I unhappily took a look at the kitchen tile I so dearly had tried to avoid. Vinyl. Oh my goodness, they make beautiful vinyl tile these days. All I had to do was choose a nice, shiny black tile that looked like granite and I would be happy.

Not in style, the sales people all said. What you want is the tumbled marble look. In a nice white, or beige, with no shiny anywhere. No, I wanted black and shiny.

For months I looked and looked. I looked in Florida, New York, Texas, and Ohio. Everywhere I was told, “No luck, sister.” It was either the wrong color, the wrong weight, the wrong material, wrong, wrong, wrong.

I got very discouraged. Then one of the coach converters wrote me to say he’d found a company that makes elevator tile (A weight issue here too! Why hadn’t I thought of that?) and they had a granite-type tile that was actually a composite of granite chips, glass and vinyl. It was light, it was tough, and it was black. Not only that, it was $7.99 a tile. Forget that you can go to Home Depot and get industrial tile for 83 cents a square foot. This would be a $7000 floor and not a $30,000 floor – the Italian price had gone up in the months I was deciding.

I now have a beautiful black floor. It was shiny for about a week. I Swiffered it and it got dull. Nothing seems to make it shiny. Not only that, everything seems to make it dirty – walking on it, for instance. We have tried everything to clean it, from dishwashing liquid to shower cleaner to Fantastic to promising the dog a year of running free on no leash if he would only lick the floor with his magic tongue. Zilch. The little bit of shiny that’s under the driver’s floor mat is bleak reminder of all I had hoped for.

But I am not done yet. We bought a bottle of urethane-type finish that the sales clerk said Walmart uses on their floors, and Walmart floors are always shiny. We’ll put it on our floor and see what happens.

Truth is, no matter how it turns out, it’s still 100 times better than that smelly old rug, and six times easier to clean than the white bricks with grout that were in the kitchen area. I’m inordinately happy with how things look, as long as I don’t look too close.

Love can forgive anything.