How we spend our weekends

You might think that a young couple, one in a band, one an artist, would be living it up every weekend.  Wild parties and late nights.  Well we've got the late nights covered, they just aren't what most might think.  

This weekend we started the kitchen floor.  We were going to wait to do this until we (okay we all know this means me) stained the cabinets and painted, but J was gung ho on getting the floor in.  His theory was we have the supplies we might as well start.  Umm, okay, fine by me.

We pulled up (okay J did all of this) all of the old faux parquet floors.  Not even a laminate, just cheep self stick tiles.  That went quickly with our new heat gun, thanks to a gift certificate from my boss.  We leveled out the subfloor and started laying tile Sunday afternoon.

We moved the stove and fridge to the other side of the room and got to work. We decided to go with a groutable vinyl floor. We decided to do this to cut down on the time it took us to lay tile and also this didn't require us to rip up the floor down to the original subfloor. If we went with a stone tile, lets say slate, we would have quite the step up from the living room to kitchen and the only way to remedy this was to rip of all the old layers of flooring. Well we're not quite at that point right now. Maybe in a few years (J keeps telling me quite a few years) when we do our full kitchen redo we'll do this.

Here we are a few hours later; over half of the floor is tiled. We decided that we would go ahead and try installing the tiles on the diagonal. I haven't decided yet if this was a mistake. There are going to be a lot of cuts, but oh well, it looks good.

This groutable vinyl is pretty easy to use. It has a self stick back and is nice and thick. You just peal and stick the tiles with spacers between them. Then you use a flexible grout to fill in space and you're good to go. You can also use them without grouting, but we decided to do the extra step. One of the best parts about these little guys is how well made they are. The printing is done really well, you can barely see the print dots when you get right up close to them. They have a nice little pearl sheen, and no two tiles are alike; just like stone.

And while J was working on all of this, I was sanding the cabinet doors and prepping them for the stain.  I also primed and painted the trim for the front entry way.  Just one or two more coats of paint and those should be ready to put back up.  I'm holding off on staining the cabinets until it's a little less toasty out, it was 92 here today.

It was a very productive weekend.  We even skipped a party we were going to go to to finish up the floor (Sorry Dan).  Boy we sure are a swinging young couple; get out of our way, we're crazy!

And here is the floor all ready for grout.  Yoda approved.  Look how nice that looks, almost like real stone. I'll try to get a close up of the tile after we grout.  I sure hope this stuff holds up.  I'm in love with it right now.  :-)