The New Floor

Recently, I found out I was losing my job. Nice way to start a new blog huh!?!? I'll post more on that later, but skipping ahead in the story, one of the contingency plans is that we may have to sell our house. Well, as you might imagine, after 12 kid years of spilled drinks and 1.5 years of dog (does that equate to 10.5 years), the carpet is a mess and needs to be replaced. So, as you might have guessed, that means we need to replace the flooring in the kitchen.

No we didn't have carpet in the kitchen and I'm not really nuts. It actually is quite logical. see we want to replace the carpet with hardwood floors. Well, the kitchen has a very nice laminate hardwood, that has held up extremely well, but we thought it would look dumb to have real hardwood next to laminate. So it had to go.


So, first thing to do was to go the the new LOWES hardware and check out our flooring options. Now, before anyone blasts me for supporting the big box store, I did try and visit some local flooring dealers. Problem was they were never open. If you own a store, you might want to try staying open after 5pm so that people who work can come and shop. Why you cater to those who don't work and close before those of us with a paycheck can come in - I don't get it.

After exploring all our options, we decided that tile in the kitchen would work well and we found this pattern here.It looked really cool and I can handle the pattern - right?

Next, I actually took the time to sketch it all out and then graphically make sure I wasn't missing anything using Google SketchUp, a cool free program. It took me a few minutes to figure out how to make the software do what I wanted, but eventually I was able to draw the living room, dining room, hallway, and kitchen with the tile pattern. The made it really easy to count up how many tiles I would need. Please don't tell Mrs. Baxter I didn't use my algebra, cause I'm pretty sure this was one of those examples she would give whenever anyone asked "when am I ever going to need to use algebra"!

Then, as luck would have it, Lowes was having their grand opening sale and it was 10% of your entire purchase. Yeah! And, if you opened a Lowes Credit account, 0% interest for 12 months - double Yeaah! And, if you screw up and open the wrong kind of account, you can opena second account and get twice as much credit - YIKES! Somehow I ended up with $17,000 credit limit for a $2000 floor.

Anyway, I was able to get everything I needed (at least for the first trip), and the Escape was able to haul it all. I'm sure it looked ridiculous with the back end dragging from all the weight in the back.

Now, the time has come to start the project. Last night I started by getting the refridgerator and stove out of the kitchen (they look mighty nice sitting inthe dining room) and start pulling up the floor.

The lock and fold laminate came up with ease and it probably took less than half an hour to have the kitchen floor bare. If only it had gone down that easy.

After a quick sweep, the kitchen was ready for the new tile. But first, I had to find the center of the room. For this, I got out my laser level and placed it in the corner of the room and pointed it to the opposite corner. I traced the line with a sharpie and then repeated with the other corner.

I guess the line is hard to see on the blog, but if you click the photo to see a larger version and it will be there. I then droped the first 13" tile in the center and started working out from there. Once I had the pattern started and the spacers in place, I decided that was enough for the day and decided to got to bed. All in all a good start to the day.