IMO painting slate will look cheap.

Why can't you work with the slate? Seems like it would be a great material for a contemporary style.

You realize you can install flooring on top of the slate without removing them. Wood look LVT should be easy to install over the slate.

The 90s called and they want their floors back.. Thats why. 😁

this slate is heavily textured and i doubt LVT could be successfully installed over it.

Floating floor

Thanks- but this is an inexpensive condo and I dont want to spend a fortune on the floors which is why I'm exploring the painting option.

I painted our exterior slate stoop. It is a uniform dark grey slate, but it was covered with efflorescence which is hard to remove. Years before I owned the house it also had vertical slate panels under the front windows, and it always looked like a dirty chalkboard. They were removed before I bought the house.

The plan was to rebuild the stoop in dark grey concrete or bluestone or soapstone, but I don't know when that is going to happen and I was tired of it looking dirty so I painted it.

I painted it to match the existing slate. It is directly in the weather, no overhang, and we do wash it regularly, so the top of the stoop does wear and need to be repainted every year or two. The sides have been fine. I haven't had any peeling or bubbling, just wear after a year or so of use.

You will have to get all the sealer and wax off before you paint.

I just used exterior latex paint. I didn't prime. I had nothing to lose really since it already looked bad. One benefit I have that you do not is that a worn spot does not show on the stoop readily since it is the same color underneath. But the wear has really been pretty minimal.

Painting it will likely ruin the chances that someone could ever go back to natural slate easily. They would not be able to get the paint out of some of the surface without a lot of work. But if you eventually change the floor anyway it doesn't matter.

I think if you use rugs in high traffic areas and keep it free of any grit or dust that could abrade the surface, you could maintain the floor for some time.

If you would replace the slate anyway, I am not sure what the downside would be except the expense, which you would have if you replaced it now, instead of painting.

This sort of floor could be handsome in the right place, but I don't think this would be a great fit for most typical small condos, because it has nothing to relate it to the other interior details.

There are some old condo buildings here that are all just white boxes as built, originally with old fashioned black VCT, the kind you have to wax. Most of these floors have been replaced of course, but with the exception of site finished strip oak, or a different Plain tile, the original black VCT looks much more suitable that a lot of the other floors people have put in. Your floor is suitable for a contemporary, organic finishes sort of house, not a small condo without any of the other coordinating finishes.

could you try large natural fiber rugs (like seagrass) to blunt the impact of the flooring?

It's not 1990's, it's 1960's. If they were installed around 2000, somebody was going for a retro vibe.

Yep, 1990s builder special. I get the desire to make them disappear. Because of the texture, I think paint is going to not look good. I too would try to cover a large percentage of each room with jute or other fiber rugs as @la_la Girl suggested. I have done this before with bad floors and it helps enourmously. There is always someone on FBMP whose new jute rugs have fallen off a truck. Try it with one room and see how you like it.

I'm moving into a condo with insanely crappy fake wood floors (LVP?) that are peeling and look like hell. I'm going the jute route.

Buy a similar tile or two at the stone shop. Paint it. See how smooth or rough it turns out. Then get it dirty and wash it.

This is the slate people were doing in the 1950s and 1960s. Directly below is the type I removed from my 1965 hearth. It was lopsided and cracked and I replaced it with a single gray slab.

The Brazilian multicolored-within-each-tile, gauged, single size, slate is a much more recent thing, I agree, end of the 20th century. I don't see any real presence of this in my vintage design library prior to the 1990s.

As for painting, I agree that this looks cheap and pretty bad: way too battleship grey and shiny

On the other hand, I think this one looks pretty decent. But she painted each piece and preserved the grout lines and took some care with the process. No solution is an all good or all terrible one. Execution is important.

Just can't imagine painted slate holding up for long. So, would recommend that you replace your tile instead.

Really I think if you hate the current floor and you are the one who has to live there, I am not sure what you have to lose except some money and time if you do it yourself, (more money if you have someone else do it) and you don't like the way it is holding up. This doesn't have to be a 0 or 100 proposition if you are willing to take the risk you won't like the result.

Because your only alternative seems to be to (1) cover it, which involved baseboard removal and under cutting door frames, possibly shortening doors and making sure you don't "trap" the dishwasher, at the very least. Or (2) Demo it and replace it with something else.

Since you don't want to do either of those right now, what is the downside? You paint it and it doesn't hold up well? You don't like the way it looks? Then what? You already don't like the way it looks. You move onto step (1) or step (2) above.

I think a lot of things that "don't hold up" hold up for some people and not for others. It depends on how hard people are on things. If you are hard on things, this probably won't hold up. If you don't wear shoes in the house--lots of people don't--how much weathering is it going to get?

I loved that skate, it was $1 sq ft at hd back in the day. I would stain or paint that in a heartbeat. Try for a warm grey, get some rugs… Sherwin Williams porch and floor paint?