Friday, February 12, 2010

House Interrupted - Before

Um, was this the weekend I scheduled our tile to be done? Okay, no problem. What? It takes 2 days to do the demo? It will take 3 or 4 days to do the tiling? Sure, right, no problem... I'll be at your mom's basement apartment - see you in a week, honey!

Just kidding! I still might have to go there, but so far I have been helping quite a bit.

This project is not purely for aesthetics. Last summer, during the dry spells, mice would get under our house and chew through any soft plumbing lines they could find (dishwasher, fridge, etc.) to get water, which caused three or four different leaks, which wreaked havoc on our laminate flooring. The seams puffed up and the cracks all got bigger. Sweeping or mopping would get stuff stuck in the cracks and the mopping would make the cracks worse and worse until I gave up (don't think I'm kidding). This is what the damage looked like...


By the way, let me just vent for a minute. Laminate flooring. Yeah. Not a fan. Turns out, the warranty for ours states that if water sits on the floor for longer than 30 seconds, the warranty is VOID! If your kid spills a glass of milk it takes longer than 30 seconds to clean it up!!! Particle board on your floor with a crappy warranty is just a bad idea. Trust me.

So after the whole kitchen area was ruined by the leaks, I called the flooring store we bought from, but they said that pattern was no longer available, so I couldn't just fix the troubled spot - and there was no way I was redoing the whole thing in laminate again. So here we are. Tiling.

Here are some before shots. This was the kitchen...


And the dining area and entry...


And the hallway...


And the bathroom, which had an extra layer of sub floor and vinyl flooring in a tile print...


Since the real tile would go down the hall, I thought it would look dumb with fake tile right next to real tile, and don't like the bathroom floor anyway, so we are replacing that, too.

We are neck-deep in demo right now. I'll share those pics and a little bit about the process soon!

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