Kitchen Remodel: Part Two

First off, the flooring pay off  - BEFORE. AND. AFTER.

Finishing the kitchen morphed into New Flooring for The Whole House. And for the first time in almost 5 years, it feels like an actual house. Not seeing subfloor, having a consistent plane to navigate in the middle of the night. Definite bonuses.

a piece of dirty old flooring on top of clean beautiful new flooring to show color

After realizing we didn't have enough of the old laminate flooring to cover the house corner to corner, I coerced Keith into letting me order new flooring. His criteria was that it be under $1/square foot and I scored with a certain orange big box store selling us 8 boxes for $192 (plus tax and underlayment). Keith's working on staining some moulding to go along the bottom and we have about 35 square feet of dark blue ceramic tile to lay at the entry way, but other than that the flooring is completed.

south end of the house - before

After realizing we didn't have enough of the old laminate flooring to cover the house corner to corner, I coerced Keith into letting me order new flooring. His criteria was that it be under $1/square foot and through a certain orange big box store, we ordered 8  boxes for $192 (plus tax and underlayment) and we have almost a full box leftover just in case.

Lazlo update: his failing back legs means he needs help scratching hard-to-reach places now.

a few rows of flooring down on the north end of the house

site supervisors were glad to have a warm & comfy place to watch the action
yoga mats under the box springs to protect new flooring from getting scratched

One of the even bigger benefits to the flooring project was having to take everything out of the house and that brought Keith and I both to a minimalist mind set. Having more space, open space and not clutter, is what's going to get us through the winter inside. So we're being very selective about what we bring back into the house. More on how we're downsizing/reducing clutter later.

My hammock came in the mail today so sometime this week or weekend we'll be giving that a try - hoping that it will spare us some more floor space. If it works okay (isn't crippling or super inconvenient), we'll eventually get rid of our mattress/box springs.

Some people have commented that our house is undergoing evolution. And that's true. This is our first house-building experience and our circumstances and choices make it even that much trickier to find out what does and doesn't work for us. I love the freedom we have to make those changes - adapt and overcome!