We Conquered the Floor!

Over the past few weeks, we have debated about what we should do with our kitchen floor. It was old black-and-white spotted linoleum that was original to the house, so it was definitely time for an update. Many Saturdays were spent wondering the isles of Home Depot looking for inspiration. We found it with some excellent $0.59 a square foot porcelain tile. Score! Porcelain tile is usually much more expensive … we loaded up the rental truck and hauled several hundred pounds of tile back to our house.

It is at this point I need to remind you of our yellow paint incident … our tile find did not escape the mystical color changing properties of our house. What once was tan now is pinkish puke color. Hmmm ... not so great and infact, I didn't take any pictures because it was so ugly. Well in the end we found a new tile that looks much better. After a cage fight with the tile… many cuts, bruises and twenty raw fingers, we conquered!

Here a look at our project and results … if you don’t think it looks better than the 1920’s linoleum, just keep it to yourself :)

This is our "before" picture. Notice the lovely appliance (and lack of others)

We started our project by tearing down all of the old, plastic tiles from the wall. They left us a present ... glue! Now we were stuck with glue all over our walls.

We then tore up all of the linoleum, which also left us a present ... glue! Only this glue and remains from the linoleum most likely contained asbestos. Although we found wood floors underneath, they weren't hardwood and everyone told us to not sand off the glue, or the "asbestos" would become airborne and toxic. As you might guess, that is what ultimately helped us in our decision to tile.

Now anyone that knows Don knows that he does anything 200% and some. So of course we couldn't just put down tile in a normal pattern. We had to plan, design and arrange the most difficult floor possible. Notice the smile on his face ...

Our planning involved chalking tons of lines to follow.

After the plans were made, we finally started to tile. Don was smiles the whole time, and this is me forcing a smile. We spent almost a week going to bed at 3 a.m. each night to get the tile done. If anyone wants to know, this is true love.

After the tile project was complete, we had to prep the walls for cabinets.

Our beautiful finished floor! Notice the intricate design of a "path" in diagonals outlined by square tiles. We also want to give a special shout out to the Ranes, who let us borrow their tile saw and inspired us with their kitchen makeover.

Finally our appliances arrived and our upper cabinets were installed. BEAUTIFUL!

SO now all we need to do is install our dishwasher and garbage disposal, add counter tops, paint and figure out how to fix the wall of glue that doesn't have any cabinets to hide it ... Definitely a work in progress, but worth it!