tgif!

Long time no post, eh?  I thought I’d brush the cobwebs off the blog and post a few random things while Kat eats her breakfast.

• I logged into WordPress today to see that it looks completely different!  I wanted to update the look of the blog, I think it’ll have to wait a couple of days while I click through and explore.
• floor update - it’s taken longer than we thought.  Jason cut his thumb on a coping saw and it slowed him down considerably.  We’re in the home stretch though, only the laundry room left!
• after the laundry room floor is done, we’re going to take a break (a forced break, actually - Jason has business out of town and then we have family coming into town for Kat’s birthday), but then we’ll move on to tiling the bathrooms.
• speaking of Kat’s birthday, because we took on the flooring projects, her bedroom won’t be done by her birthday.  I feel terribly guilty about that.
• I got Jag a little fish tank for his room; he’s loving it so far!  He picked out all the decor… red gravel, a skull for the fish to swim through/hide in and a few little plants.  He’s got a reddish purplish male betta and 3 rasboras in there now, and we’re thinking of maybe adding a couple of cory cats soon.  He’s been good about feeding them everyday without me asking.
• I’ve been feeling yucky for a long time now, and finally found out this week it’s vertigo.  Not fun.
• Kat’s had a verbal explosion lately.  She’s singing, counting to 10 and pretty much saying everything she needs or wants to say.  It’s funny to finally understand what’s going on in that little mind of hers - she’s quite a character!
• I’m in a photography slump, one of those where I don’t feel like taking pictures, and the few pictures that I do take, I’m really unhappy with.  I know this is pretty typical for all photographers (this isn’t the first time I’ve been through it), but it’s always so painful for me.  I’m ready to get back into the swing of things and feel good about my work again!  I’m thinking of updating my version of Photoshop and investing in Lightroom in hopes of a fresh start.
• I’m addicted to the Packrat application on Facebook.  I’m too embarrassed to say how much time I’ve wasted playing at night after the kids are in bed.
• I bought this as part of Kat’s birthday gift, and it is just sooooo cute.  Seriously.  I almost hope she doesn’t like it so I can keep it for myself.  (also, I bought it from that very site and the transaction was flawless)

That’s all I’ve got for now - it took me over an hour to type just that with all the interruptions.  More later!  (and email replies as well, I’m WEEKS behind - I’m so sorry!)

floor sneak peek

We’ve been super busy with this whole new floor project, but thought I’d take a minute to post a quick pic I took last Friday of the breakfast nook.  This room has been grouted now too, but we’ve moved the fridge and some other random things in there while we work on the main part of the kitchen so I haven’t taken updated pictures yet.

I’ll scrounge up some time to post more later - hope you all had a Happy Easter!

there’s no turning back now!

And I’m freaking out!!

We finally made a tile decision over the weekend.  We ended up going with something that’s sort of a grayish, brownish and maybe even a slight hint of greenish (if you look in last week’s picture, it’s on the very top right, although the colors look different in our kitchen).  Don’t tell Jason, but I’m having doubts again.  I don’t think he’s keen on taking 22 boxes of tile back, so I’m going to give it a couple of days to see it in different light.  Even if I don’t love it, I think it does look *okay* and honestly I’m not sure I care enough to start the decision process all over again.  So we’ll see.

After we got the kids to bed, Jason started ripping up the vinyl floors and I started to panic.  OMG, we’re doing this!  We can’t change our minds now!

I know in the end we’ll be glad we did it, but right now I’m wondering why we thought it was worth the chaos we’ll have to live in for the next… well, however many weeks it takes to scrape the adhesive off the concrete floor.  ;-P

Jason started ripping everything up so fast, I didn’t have a chance to get before shots (although I have a couple of decent pictures of the kitchen that I took a couple of years ago when we thought we were putting it on the market so I’ll dig those up later), but I did grab the camera and get a couple of the lovely concrete slab and adhesive.  These pictures are poor quality, but you get the idea…

Next on our decision list:  carpet!  I brought home a sample board of frieze, want to get that decision made ASAP so we can get the ball rolling on that as well.

new floors! - a home improvement project

This is going to be a loooooong, drawn-out project (like pretty much every project we do, ha!)  I’ll document with posts and photos as it progresses.

First, I have to tell you a secret.  The floors in my kitchen?  Not wood.  Nope.  It’s VINYL!  Vinyl that looks like wood.  Okay before you groan and say “ew,” I will tell you that I can’t count how many times someone has come into our house and said “beautiful wood floors!”  Granted, that’s before they actually walked on the floor.  But totally fooled, so it’s always made me feel a little better about it.  (The wood floor in my foyer is not vinyl however.  I love it, and it stays.)

A little back-story:  when we built the house 4.5 years ago, we asked for an estimate on putting wood floors throughout and actually didn’t think the number was that bad, but the real estate agent/builder’s rep (who was awful to deal with, just awful) told us it would be even cheaper to do it ourselves later.  We believed her and had them put in this wood-looking vinyl in the kitchen, breakfast nook and laundry room to hold us over until we got around to getting the nice floors in.  Welp, we never got around to it (ha, another typical story for us) and come to find out, it’s way more expensive for us to do than it was to have the builder do it.  She was on crack.  And we should have done our research.  So here we are.

Okay so with that out of the way, I’ll also say that we have decided to stay in this house a little longer (and by little, I mean more than a year, less than 4 - we don’t have an exact number).  Since we aren’t here for the long haul, we’ve decided now against the wood floors throughout.  It’s just not worth it to us (we’ve got another idea for that money now - more on that later).  So we’ve decided to replace vinyl floors with tile and replace our old, crappy builder’s carpet with new, pretty carpet.

Yay for new floors!

Um, except booo on picking out new floors!  I never realized how overwhelming, exhausting and just plain NOT FUN picking out tile is.  I’m not enjoying it.  I’ve got a stack of tiles too heavy for me to even pick up by myself and none of them look right to me.  We have different light in different parts of the room, so tiles that look good in the natural light of the breakfast nook look like junk in the artificial light of the kitchen, and vice versa.  Really frustrating.

I’ve gone from darker tiles to lighter tiles; from grayish tones to brownish tones.  Nothing is striking me.  And I need something to strike me before I can commit to it.

Jason saw a discount/factory outlet type tile place in town, so that’s our next stop.  Cross your fingers for me, hopefully something there will be perfect and maybe I’ll get lucky and it’ll be inexpensive too!

Oh and on the bright side?  I *did* find carpet that struck me!  Hopefully I can find tile that works in the kitchen AND coordinates with the carpet because I really love the carpet.  More on that when we’re done dealing with tile!