The neighbourhoods we work in most
Downtown and the Rosemary District, Laurel Park, Southside Village, Arlington Park, Gillespie Park, Indian Beach and Sapphire Shores, Bird Key, Lido Key, St. Armands, The Meadows, Palmer Ranch, and out along Siesta Drive toward the key.
Terrazzo, and the decision people get wrong
A great many Sarasota houses built between about 1950 and 1975 have original poured terrazzo under whatever went on top of it in the 1990s. Homeowners often plan to tile straight over it and then find out what is underneath.
That is worth stopping for. Original terrazzo is a genuinely good floor — dense, cool, and impossible to buy new at the price of restoring it. If it is sound, we will usually tell you to grind and polish it rather than sell you a tile job on top of it. If it is cracked through, or it has been broken up by plumbing runs, covering it is the sensible answer.
Downtown condos and the sound rule
If you are in a downtown or Gulf-front building, the association almost certainly has a rule about hard flooring over an occupied unit, and it will be written as a minimum impact-insulation rating. Practically, that means a rated acoustic underlayment under any tile or plank, and it means the underlayment is part of the quote rather than an upgrade.
Get the association's written requirement before anybody prices the job. We ask for it as a matter of course, because a floor that has to come up because nobody read the rules is the most expensive mistake in this market.
Slabs
Most of the city is slab on grade. Older slabs move more than new ones and are rarely flat to the tolerance large-format panels want, so the levelling is usually the real line item on a renovation here rather than the tile.
If what brought you here was the other kind of slab — porcelain slabs for shower walls, the sheets up to five feet by ten that go up in two pieces — that is its own subject, and the panel installation is a large part of what our crews do in this city.
The same crews and the same schedule cover Siesta Key across the bridges and Longboat Key up the Gulf — the island pages say what changes once the tile has to cross a drawbridge.
