The kitchen floor fiasco finale (for real this time) (really!)
It’s done! Finished! Complete! Poof! Yep – the floor is done. Quarter round has been added. Seams have all been caulked. Everything has been painted. And a permanent smile is plastered on my face.
DONE.
Here’s the progression (for anyone who’s visual, like me.)
I started with this…
…which (thankfully!) turned into this…
…Sweetie then added quarter round, which looked like this…
…then I caulked and painted everything, leaving a sparkly new (and finished) (and not blue) kitchen floor, that looks like this…
Am I happy much? YES. Have a already christened my new floor with a silly little happy dance? Of course. Does this occasion call for a big bottle of wine? Absolutely.
(Although pretty much any occasion is a good excuse for wine, if you ask me.)
One more thing done off our big ol’ to-do pre-listing list. And one major item completed from the list of things I’ve been meaning to do since we moved into this humble little abode 2.5 years ago.
Progress, how ever slow, is still progress. :)
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It’s time for a little twine (another use-whatcha-got sorta solution)
So I was looking around my dining room post-pine china cabinet removal project, and something still didn’t seem… light and airy. (And, of course, light and airy equals awesome and desirable when it comes to selling, you know.) The culprit? My curtain tie-backs. Yes, really. I KNOW – they’re little and insignificant and I’m likely a crazy person for thinking that they were bringing the room down. But look…
Here’s the before (dark and heavy-looking):
After! (Pretty, simple, and breezy!)
Yep! That’s twine. So does this officially make me the strange lady who uses twine to tie back her curtains? Perhaps. I decided that the black ribbon was far too dark and formal-ish (can ribbon be formal? Let’s say yes…) and went searching through my house for a replacement and the first thing I stumbled upon was the big spool of twine that normally resides under my kitchen sink. But despite that it’s a rather utilitarian sort of thing, I actually think it kinda works with the sort of rustic pine-ish-ness of the room.
Or I may just be grasping at straws here. Either way, I like it! And those curtain tie-backs cost me roughly three cents in twine. Cheap and cheerful indeed! :)
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I’m packin up, packin up, packin up, packin up (cuz my stager taught me good)
I’m so SO sorry – I had to. I really couldn’t resist. Please don’t hate me around 3pm tomorrow afternoon when you’re still humming that song.
And in case you have absolutely no idea what I’m talking about, here – watch this…
It’s quite the catchy little tune eh?
I’ve been packing up (packin up, packin up, packin up) for a few days now. Specifically, the dining room has been ruthlessly cleared out, as recommended by Ms Stager who said the room would look much much bigger without the china cabinet and with less cluttery stuff on the bookshelf. And, of course, she was right. See?
BEFORE (with lots of pine):
AFTER (so much bigger looking!)
I should have removed the china cabinet YEARS ago, eh? Ms Stager is really really smart. :)
Luckily, Sweetie invested in a storage unit (since we seem to have a lot of stuff, and stuff isn’t particularly good for staging), so removing the china cabinet from the dining room was indeed a realistic decluttering option. And, if nothing else, the room looks far less pine-y without it. I’m pretty sure I’ll be painting the china cabinet before it reappears at our next happy little abode.
Oh! And see that mirror? That’s new. Once the china cabinet was gone, the wall behind the table was a little… empty-looking. I found that lovely mirror at my beloved HomeSense store for TWENTY BUCKS. Yep. Twenty. Why so insanely cheap and cheerful? The frame has a few scratches.
But you only really notice these if you’re standing four inches from the mirror. And I’m assuming potential house buyers won’t be carefully examining my wall-hangings.
Falling into the category of “weird things that I own and love” is this Mozart teapot that’s now been carefully packed away…
It’s one of my most favourite things ever. And yes, he’s holding the score to the Marriage of Figaro tightly in his hand (which also serves as the spout. Yep – it’s not just a decorative teapot! This baby is functional!) Ridiculously silly, I know, but it makes me smile.
So that’s where things are at for the moment. New kitchen floor? Check. Severely decluttered and prettied up dining room? Check. Basement painting half finished? Check. Progress moving way slower than expected? CHECK. Ugh. I’m hoping we can get everything we need to get done by the end of April.
A full month behind schedule.
But then again, I’m always late. For everything. So why would this be any different, I suppose. If nothing else, I’m consistent. :)
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My fantastic floating floor finale (well, almost…)
After months (well, YEARS, technically) of deliberation and debate and ongoing ponderings over the virtues of THIS floor versus THAT floor and what about THIS option over here and hey – why don’t we just cover the whole darn floor in PLYWOOD and just paint the stupid thing once and for all… I officially have a new kitchen floor.
And it’s not blue.
And there are no giant ugly gouges marring its loveliness.
And it looks clean and fresh and sparkly and new. :)
See?
Sigh. Yep. I’m a happy girl. Despite taking nearly THREE whole afternoons to lay (Dear Allure flooring folk: while I adore your product, it’s not necessarily as easily installed as you claim for those of us who are a tad OCD and really want all the seams to line up all nice and neat and such) and despite that it’s not my much adored hickory-look floor (oh, how I wanted that hickory-look floor!) it’s still way better than the 1980′s era flooring-monstrosity that hides underneath.
And, most importantly, it’s not blue.
Should we do a quick Before and After? Likely. Just because I’m super ridiculously proud like that.
The rather depressing BEFORE (with ugly 1980′s peel and stick blue tiles and a whole lot of ickiness)…
AFTER (pretty and clean and NOT BLUE)…
What’s that you say? Why yes – that IS a pretty new yellow tea towel (thank you for noticing!) I’m quite sure that Galen over at President’s Choice made that specifically for me because he knew yellow would look nice with my amazing new floor (and I think he was right.)
And see that bowl of lemons? Yep. That’s me practicing my fancy-pants house-staging tactics. Snazzy eh? Because I would never randomly just leave a bowl of fruit sitting out on my counter like that (since, well, I don’t eat much fruit, and it’d likely be all moldy and gross by the time I actually remembered it’s there. Which would make me sad.) (Unless we’re talking bananas here. Bananas are always a countertop fruit. But they don’t look nearly as pretty as lemons do in a bowl.)
So what’s missing? Quarter round. That goes on next (thanks to Sweetie’s stellar carpentry skills.) And then the floor drama will officially be over. Forever. Hooray! Tada!
Or at least until the next house. (Teehee.)
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Kitchen floor progress (yep, I finally took the kitchen floor plunge!)
Look!
That there is my new kitchen floor going down. Finally. Fiiiiiiiinally. (Insert big huge ridiculously silly happy dance HERE.) It’s amazing how the rush to get your house listed for spring (aka prime house-selling season) will suddenly move any much-deliberated but never-initiated projects into fast-forward mode. Yep – two and a half years of griping about our ugly kitchen floor (and much ongoing debate over what to replace it with) later, and we’re finally making ‘er pretty.
Progress rocks. :)
Sweetie removed all the quarter round for me last weekend…
And then I patched the icky holes in the old peel and stick tiles…
And then floor-laying officially began! I started yesterday with this…
Which then grew into this…
And then eventually became this (much later in the day and under ugly artificial light)…
I finally called it a night when I had enough flooring down that I could move the appliances back into place.
If you’ve been following my (ongoing) floor drama at all, you might notice that this isn’t the floor I originally wanted. Like, at all. I had big lovely hickory-look flooring plans. However all that quickly changed when I found a batch of flooring on clearance. Yep – I went cheap and cheerful on my resale-bound floor. Regularly $47 per box (with each box covering 24 square feet) I found four boxes of this particular floor (Allure’s Resilient Flooring in Patina) in Home Depot’s clearance pile for $30 each. And even after supplementing my clearance boxes with one additional box at full price (since four boxes would have given me exactly enough to do the floor without any extra for errors or weird cuts or things like that) the whole floor will cost about $170 in the end (plus a whole lot of elbow grease), which seems pretty darn reasonable, if you ask me! It’s not exactly what I wanted (and if we were planning to stay in this house, I would have committed to my beloved, but pricier, hickory-look floor) but for resale? It’ll do. :)
Assuming I give it a good solid effort, I’ll likely (hopefully!) have the rest of the floor down today. While it’s not quite as easy to put down as the good folk at Allure would like you to believe, it’s not particularly difficult either. It’s just time consuming. And a little finicky when it comes to making sure the seams are all tight.
Looking very (very!) forward to finally (finally!!!) checking “make kitchen floor look much much prettier and way less blue” off my to-do list. Next pre-listing project in line: countertops. :)
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