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!