Last week we went from this:

To this:

Yay for tile! When we bought our place almost 2 years ago it had an ugly and annoying little rip in the floor in the kitchen that we were told was unrepairable. Last week we had all of the vinyl flooring in our house covered with tile! We did some shopping around at a few places and ended up buying the tile through the same place we bought our carpet. We went with 18″ tiles downstairs and 12″ tiles in the two bathrooms upstairs.

We picked a darker grout than what they put in, but by the time we realized it we decided it wasn’t worth having them take it out and redo it, we didn’t want to deal with that mess! We like the grout they used, just wanted the darker one so it wouldn’t show dirt as much. It still turned out very nice!

We considered doing the install ourselves (well, it was mostly just me that considered it), but Jodi wanted it to get done quickly and right the first time. The guys that put it in did an excellent job and completed the job in 3 days, several weeks faster than it probably would have taken me!

We finally finished replacing all of the appliances in the kitchen! At first we replaced the stove, it was so gross we tried cleaning it but decided it wasn’t even worth it. Next was the dishwasher, it was noisy, didn’t clean very well and was also dirty. Soon after the dishwasher we found a sweet deal on a fridge and replaced the old white midget fridge with something that actually keeps food fresh without adding mysterious odors.

The last thing to replace was the microwave above the stove. The one we had worked alright but was dirty and it didn’t match since it was white and everything else was stainless steel. The bottom of the microwave was completed gunked up with grease and we’ve tried to clean it several times but never made much progress. While we were removing it our hands got disgusting! We replaced it with a Frigidaire PLMVZ169GC that we purchased from Best Buy. Now all the appliances are newer, nicer and contain only our dirt! The original ones were all so gross!

The sales person at Best Buy tried to get us to purchase the install service along with it for about $100 but Jodi and I decided we would be adventurous and do it ourselves. He tried to warn me that he installed one once and it took all weekend and 4 people. It ended up being pretty easy for us, the only reason we didn’t get it installed the same day we bought it was because we painted the wall after we took the old one down since the new one didn’t quite go down as low so we had to let that dry overnight.

Old microwave uninstalled	New microwave in packing material still	Microwave hole
Fresh paint, thanks Jodi!	Everything put back together

We put some new lights in our house this past couple of weeks in our quest to replace everything gold. A friend of mine just built a new house and his wife got a good deal on some nice new lights that they decided to put in. He gave us a good deal on some of his old lights (which had only been used for a couple weeks). We purchased some closet lights and a couple of dome lights from him. A couple of the closet lights are 2-bulb lights and the others are single bulb. The dome lights are 3-bulb lights. We still have a few more lights to replace, but most of them are done now. We want to put ceiling fans in the bedrooms and want to get a new kitchen light as well.

We also bought a new light at IKEA for our dining room called the KRYSSBO Pendant lamp. It is unique and we really like it. It has 7 halogen bulbs and gives off a good amount of light, but not as much as the old light. It was really easy to install and put together.

Today I replaced the thermostat in the kitchen. The old one we had was pretty basic and we wanted one that we could program. We put in a new Honeywell Vision 8500 with a touchscreen. We also got our new stove, it is very nice! We already used the warming drawer to raise some rolls and used the oven to make some dinner. We really like the touch controls to run it all and the smooth top is going to be really nice. We played with it a little but it does a lot of stuff so it will take some time to get use to it all.

We finished painting the kitchen last night. When we got home from work we taped it back up to prepare for the second coat. My friend Justin stopped by for a few minutes as well so we took a little break while he was here. After he left we decided to just paint and get it done with. It was about 1am when we finished, only took us a little less than 2 hours to get it all painted.

Since Jodi and I are getting a new stove delivered and installed tomorrow we decided to paint the kitchen while we had things out and away from the wall. When we got home from work we taped it all up and painted our fooling heads off all evening. We finished about 10:30pm, used about half a gallon of paint but we got it done. Now tonight we just need to do a second coat.

After the kitchen is done we just are planning to do the bathrooms at some point, we are not in a rush to get them done though. Doing the kitchen was nicer than what we did the last couple of weeks. It was nice not to have to drive home after painting and also nice that we weren’t really on a time crunch, just mostly needed to finish one wall.