My Very Own Hell's Kitchen

I FINALLY have kitchen floors! Let's throw a party! Actually, we will be having one next month because I'm so happy that my house is finally presentable enough to have company over. Why wasn't it presentable before?

Original peel-and-stick tile (and PINK paint from the previous owner):



Looks decent in the photo but awful in person. Dirty was caked in the crevices and the tile was blech. To match the lovely border, I suppose.

The new floor:




(Wall color is Dutchboy's Roasted Tomato)

Then the ice maker leaked and wasn't discovered until two days later. I lived with the concrete floor for too long as we worked on other projects. And thank goodness we didn't replace right away because the water heater leaked a couple months later and would have ruined it again.



The kitchen was finished Thursday night. I walked into the kitchen about 8 times yesterday and giggled every time. lol It makes the room look so much more airy! It feels twice as large.



I still need to add baseboards but it looks pretty good so far doesn't it? :)

Project Cost Breakdown:
Paint and supplies: $40 (WalMart's Color Place and tinted gray primer)
Light fixture: $40
Light switches: $12
Floors: $76 (Ikea's Tundra laminate in maple)
Total cost: $168

The next step is to replace the kitchen cabinets. The existing ones aren't very functional and they are OLD. Original to the house so that makes them 60+ years old! I've been eyeing the Ikea ones in Adel White.





The only great thing about having such a small kitchen is that it's not that expensive to replace the cabinets!

When Big Projects have Little Visual Payoff

It's an awful feeling when you slave away for 2 full days and have very little to show for your work. :( I've mentioned before that we had some water damage to our floors a while back. The laminate started to separate at the seams. Most cracks were the width of a penny.

We've made a lot of progress but the change isn't huge. It's not like when we went from pink carpet and walls to laminate and warm taupe walls:





Two days later, we're about 75 percent done. We just have to do the two entryway closets, a small portion of the dining room, and the kitchen. My knees are bruised, the tendons in my wrists kill, and my hamstrings are so tight! Oh, and I have a couple oddball cuts and dings. (I'm a klutz!)

In the thick of it:


I've had to be super organized when we pulled up the flooring. (While it might not look like it from the above pic! lol) Most of the boards weren't damaged. The ones that were just happened to be in the MIDDLE of the room so everything had to be pulled up. I marked which boards to toss, which ones could be reused if the end was cut off, etc.



See those cracks?!





I marked the underside of the good boards with numbers so we could lay them back down in the same order. It was all about efficiency and reusing what we could. Matt thought I was crazy! But I'll have more than half of the 10 boxes leftover.

I even marked the quarter round (which we had never gotten to installing) so I'd know which room and area the pieces belonged when we put it back together. I have no idea what EW stands for though! lol Entryway? Or East-West and I forgot to mark the room??



Our disarray of a living room as we had to move everything from one side to the other:



(At least I was able to coral those cords nice and neat while they were exposed.)

There are no "after" pics because, well, it photographs exactly the same. lol But it will be nice to have a real kitchen floor instead of a concrete one!