kitchen renovation reveal

 

The kitchen was one of the biggest transformations of our house, and a room we are (now) pretty proud of, but it took a long time to get there. We had originally put down tile with a heating element underneath. The tile didn’t last. We were noobs at the whole thing and part of it was that we probably walked on it too soon (you have to go through the kitchen to get to the bathroom) and we should have glued the cement board down to eliminate some of the flexing of the floor. Because the tiles were long and rectangular, they were extra susceptible to a flexing floor. Lesson learned.

So that we wouldn’t become accustomed to the issue, I would remove tiles as they started to come up as a reminder that we needed to address the problem. The brilliant plan backfired and we were suddenly living on a half tiled, half motored floor. My feet were not happy. On top of that, we had let the problem go on too long and we couldn’t just put the tiles back because they would be higher than the rest going on top of dried motar.

We put some boards on top of the floor so we wouldn’t have to look or walk on it and started living life. More than a year went by and we had gotten used to the new normal, an ugly floor we couldn’t bare to look at and constantly had to make excuses for.

Then we decided to pull the Bandaid and just fix the issue. We took out the tile, took out the expensive heating element (had to trash it, cry), took out the cement board and were left with the below. A trip to home depot and a purchase of about $800 worth of wood flooring later we were ready to tackle it all, again.