I ordered the new tile on Friday, we are going with a Pendio Beige Travertine. We bought through Direct Buy's local wholesaler, Metro Floors, I've used these guys before and they have some great prices. I searched to the end of the Internet trying to find the best price for these tiles. The best I could find was $3.47 psf. I bought them from Metro for $2.49. On 860 sqft, that's a $850 saving...
So... Since I ordered the tile and it's going to be in on Tuesday, Kari and I figured that we needed to get the old tile torn up. For those of you haven't torn up Saltilo tile before the rumors are it's about as bad as cutting your arm off with a butter knife. Since we had already taken some up around the front door area and didn't have any problems at all we decided that we'd tackle it for a Sunday afternoon project. Well, as expected the majority of it came up without any problems. Expect for the 50 sqft that someone thought it would be funny to use a different type of grout (must be the type everyone else has) I beat on this stuff with a grubbing hoe for 2 hours before I could get this little bit of tile up and most of the grout is still stuck to the concrete. I'm not for sure what I'm going to do about this. I'll let my tile layer figure that out.
Here are some pics.....