Kitchen Floor Makeover

Waaaaayyyy back in February of 2008, a long time before I even thought about starting a blog, we gave our kitchen floor a makeover.  We didn't have a lot of extra money back then because we had just bought the house that summer and got married a month later, but the floor was AWFUL.  The tile was hideous, the grout hadn't been sealed properly and was breaking out and it was horribly stained.  No matter how much I cleaned it, it always felt dirty and looked dirty.  Anyway, I digress, I finally convinced my hubby that we could make it look and feel a whole lot better, even if we just bought some cheap linoleum tiles.  We shopped around and found some we liked at Menard's (that happened to be on sale!) and bought them.  My parents made the trip down to O-town to help us pull it all off.

As it turns out, which we already kinda figured, whoever put the tile in had absolutely NO idea what they were doing, so we had a much bigger project on our hands than we originally thought.  So, we called in more help and my father-in-law came over with some more tools and an extra pair of hands.

Here is what the kitchen looked like the weekend we moved in; hate the color, hate the light fixture, really hate the floor and who puts a tv on a wall stand these days other than cheap motels??

Here are my handy dad and handy hubby tearing out the subflooring which had about a million nails holding it in place.  It was cement board and the wrong material to use under the tile.  It made the kitchen floor about 1/2 inch higher than the rest of the floors.

 Here is my father-in-law measuring out the plywood to be used as the new subflooring.

 Here is a shot of all the trash that we ended up with, and that sat on our deck covered by a tarp until the weather got nice.  Actually, I think we ended up with more bags than are shown in the picture.

 We added our names and the date to the floor boards as a personal touch!

Here is a really flattering picture of me laying down the new linoleum tiles.

 And here is a picture of what the floor looks like now.  It's not what I would've chosen if we could've afforded something better, but it works for this house.  But one thing that doesn't work is that disgusting light fixture!!  It's still there and I still hate it, but I'm not so sure what I want there, so it stays for now.

I wish I had better pictures of the entire process, but like I said, I wasn't blogging at the time and never really intended to, so these were just taken for us to document our accomplishment of installing a new floor.

There is still a lot that we need to do in that kitchen, so hopefully I'll be getting around to more projects soon!