Well I can tell you how Kelly and I spent it… laying some tile. It’s been two day and we still not quite finished. We have been trading out laying the tile to give each others back a break. We finally are to a point that we have getting the right consistency in the mortar, placing, cutting, and setting the tile.

Me and Kelly have a habit of going big when it comes to projects (or just about anything). We don’t realize the full extent of the project until we are to far in to back out. I had a four day trip for work so Kelly wanted to start ripping up the floor while I was gone. I showed her how to pull up the baseboard and vinyl flooring and like the subcontractor of my dreams off she went.

As my day job kept be away from home, Kelly was busy coming home from her day job to labor away at the vinyl floor. I think she put it best when she said “It’s not the vinyl floor that gets you… it’s the glue”. Each night as I lay in my bed in my hotel I would receive a pic of her progress.

By the time I returned home she had removed most of the old flooring from the Kitchen and Dining Room. Now there is close to 472 different ways according to the Internet to remove the glue from a cement floor. Let me tell you that each of the ones we tried suck.

So to add to our little glue removing adventure we discovered a little crack that is less than an 1/8th of an inch wide and over 12 feet long. Why not add patching a crack to the list of things to do. Now I’m sure by now you are asking yourself why would anyone attempt something so daring… so crazy? I’ll tell you why… I love it (Not sure if Kelly fully agrees with me). I love to see the transformation that is the result of your labor. You can’t pay a contractor for that. So as Kelly continued to rock out the flooring demo. I started to demo the upper cabinets in preparation for the new fridge surround.

We are going to refinish the lower cabinets and replace the counter tops but all the upper cabinets are going to get replaced. The first of these to get built will be the fridge surround with upper cabinets. Due to it’s size I built the carcass in the living room and then set it in place.

With the carcass in place we call it a night. There will be plenty of fun and excitement for tomorrow and then some. So far I think we are making some pretty good progress.

Not sure if I mentioned it… Vinyl flooring glue sucks!!!

We had originally picked out some tile that was in our price range online that we liked… well that was until we saw it at the store. It just screamed “You get what you pay for”! At that point we figured it wouldn’t hurt to look around some more. There were plenty of premium tile there that would look just fine on our kitchen floor but now that fit into our budget and Kelly wasn’t looking at getting a second job. Then the clouds parted and the angels began to sing… CLEARANCE!!!!!

We found a beautiful tile that was just what we were looking for. But Oh wait… there wasn’t enough. That store was short by over 100 tiles. Our options were to keep up the search or buy some of those tiles that stick to the floor. Then it hit me. Isn’t there more than one of those big blue box stores? and might another one also have some? Could this be the answer? Lucky for us we would be out near another one of these said stores the very next day. So after two stores and a few miles we purchased (fingers crossed) everything we needed to do all of our tiling.