Ugh! Check out that nasty brown linoleum floor, complete with cigarette burns, giant rips, and peeling seams. The cabinets were covered in nasty grease (I hear the previous tenant liked to fry a lot of foods...) The stove is missing knobs, and the exhaust fan doesn't work. Not to mention, the exhaust fan vented through the shower in the bathroom!!! It was definitely in need of some TLC... or a complete overhaul!
This is another picture of the kitchen. You can see the awkward layout with the bathroom door right next to the stove, which makes making any changes to the layout damn near impossible without renovating the bathroom as well.
The first step is to remove the nasty vent that went through the shower in the bathroom.
Then we pulled out the cabinets, and found some nice surprises. :-) There was a spoon, knife, a beautiful picture, a bunch of dust, and a coupon for Snuggle from 1987.
Then, we pulled out the nasty gross plastic cabinets and laid down cement board as a foundation for the new tile.
The cement board isn't actually laid down at this point. We had to make sure we had enough before we started to lay it down!
The cement board, without the fridge. Makes the kitchen look so much bigger!!!
The laundry room will also get grey tile. I screwed in 1,797 screws all by myself to get this cement board down.
We used a grey thinset to lay down the tile because the tile is grey. It looked like a giant bucket of grey cake mix. We even used a huge mixer to mix it up!
Here is my tile!
Mom and dad laid the first few tiles. I took pictures. :-)
We wanted to make sure the tiles were nice and level before we continued.
We did the corner closest to the dining room first, as we had to cut a lot of tiles around where the cabinets were going to be. When tiling, you are supposed to divide the room into quarters, then start in the middle of the room.
Tiling a floor requires a lot of thinset! Making thinset also requires two people sometimes!
This is what my tile looks like without grout. I like the staggered look of the tiles.
Laundry room, without grout. Or, you know, a washer and dryer. The green paint is "leftover" paint from the living room. It was too bright for the living room, but I kind of like it in the laundry room! (Anything is better than what was in there before!)
The other side of the kitchen. This is where the cabinets will go. I love how you can see where the old vent was and where the cabinets were. Eeewww.
The pretty grey tile on my kitchen floor! Check out how yellow the tile makes the walls look! (This is before we cleaned off the grout, so it looks a little dirty.)
The laundry room. The dryer has my microwave and toaster oven on it because there is no room for them on the counter in the kitchen!
These are the cabinets a friend gave me for free, and the old countertop sitting on top of them. We couldn't put the old cabinets back in (and who would want to!?) because we pretty much destroyed them when we took them out. I'm going to refinish the cabinets at some point. Obviously, I need to get a stove to put in here. :-)
Of course, what home improvement project is complete without an injury!? This is the massive bruise I obtained when I fell into the heating vent trying to lay down the first piece of cement board. My mom thought I broke my arm when I fell. Instead, I bruised my knee and bent back two toenails. Ouch!
*This is why I ended up screwing in 1,797 screws by myself. So I had a blister on my hand as well as the giant bruise and bump from falling in the hole.
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