A Tale of Travertine

Just when I vow to start blogging more, Summer blows in with all it's sunny deliciousness and I get kicked outta my house for 9 straight days.  I blogged a little bit about our kitchen/entry floors here, here, and then a little bit more here.  I don't know why, but I was lazily thinking putting in new floors wouldn't really disrupt our everyday routines...but, it totally did.  What we thought would be a 4 day stint turned into 9 days + weekends.  Our house was a wreck and some complications with leveling our subfloors really made it a dusty mess.  With our appliances in the livingroom, our kitchen wasn't really functional, and I was caught completely unprepared.  We ate out a lot.  And I totally got so used to our fridge being in the livingroom that I instinctively went looking for some iced tea there one night while watching TV.  

Well, our floors have been finished for about a week now.  Our house has been deep cleaned for a little less than that.  And I finally snapped a few pics of how things are looking real quick while the boys were out playing in the backyard!  Let me just say...things are looking surprisingly a lot more modern, scalloped cabinets and all!

My flouescent cave of a kitchen is notoriously hard to photograph, but I'm really happy with how the floors turned out.  Really, really happy.  Our kitchen feels wider, brighter, and ummm, much cleaner.  The travertine suits the space, and the natural stone really vibes with our old floors, which is really what I was hoping for!  PLUS, cheers to being able to find food that gets dropped on the floor!! 

Without going into too many of the gory details (umm, really not that gory) and for the sake of brevity, I'll just say we had a few hiccups involving communication + tile layout + level floors.  And this combo set us back a few days, and quite a few $$$$ dollars.  So!  What we have learned (again) is that next time we will get multiple bids--no matter what (sometimes lessons need to be learned a few times before they sink in, haha).  And we will think twice about using someone we know personally.  Not that he didn't do a great job, because he did!  But just that it makes things awkward when problems do arise. 

Anyway, it's crazy how much calmer I feel waking up and walking into our kitchen.  In an odd way I can't describe, these new floors are great for my soul.  There is peace of mind knowing that one more project is done, yes, but also a breath of fresh air not having to stare at yellowed linoleum patterned floor under flourescent lights all the time.  These floors really are lovely. 

Up next for us, is adding the baseboards and transitions in (which Dave did most of Saturday) and then some paint touch-ups.  Then after that, I'm gonna finally repaint our mermaid green bedroom.  Other than that, I'm just gonna be really trying to soak up the sun and all this free family time Dave and I suddenly have!!

For fun, here are some before and afters from when we very first bought the house...disclaimer to my brother-in-law who did this pose in just about every before pic I have (he really is so funny)...and disclaimer to what I have going on in my livingroom.  Progress is progress, right?