Chateau Shields Gets New Floors

Well, we definitely like projects and have had a lot of fun updating our house, but this project was a whole new level of project for us.  We decided to update all the tile on the main floor of our house.  We had two different types of tile one white-ish tile in the living room area and a pinky orange one in the kitchen/family room area.  Lots of people didn't mind the white-ish tile but it was super porous and had lots of divots in it that collected dirt.  The pinky orange tile was really, really dirty (even if I scrubbed hard!) and chipped in lots of places so we saved up and pulled the trigger on new tile.  We chose a wood looking tile because we like the look of wood but love the easy maintenance of tile.  I have no idea how to clean and maintain wood, especially in the dry desert that I live.  We wanted everything to flow between the rooms instead of having two different types of flooring.  We also needed to account for the fact that we have kids which means lots of spills and crummies and we have a pool which means a lot of dripping as we come inside. So tile was our pick.
We looked at wood looking tile at a few places and all were coming in at $5 or $6/sq foot.  Our house is on the smaller side, but still did not have the budget for that price.  Then we went back to the flooring place where we had purchased our carpet for the upstairs and found that they had some tile that we liked priced at wholesale cost. Hooray! AND miracle of miracles- we needed about 900 sq ft and they had about 1000 sq ft left in their entire warehouse.  I guess you could say we were meant to have this flooring in our house!

We started looking at flooring in the Fall and decided to get it finished before it was too hot outside and before our Japan trip.  Then we did the crazy thing and said let's rip it all up and get started on it so that we can have Laila's birthday and Harrison's baby blessing with new floors!  It was a great idea but incredibly stressful since everything ended up taking longer than expected and the floor wasn't even finished by that date.  More on that later.
Michael got bids from a few people that could lay the tile and we ended up choosing someone who had lots of experience and we decided to lower the cost by removing the old tile ourselves.  Michael worked his tail off to get the tile up and out of the house so we could make sure the floors were even.  But he had to go on a business trip so he worked endlessly for about 24 hrs just to finish.  It was the loudest, dustiest, tiring day!  I finally had to have Michael stop at 10 PM because you could hear the demo all around our circle outside.  It was so loud.  To top it off, we did this right before my roommates came to visit which you can read about HERE. Before Michael hurried off to the airport he brought in some basic furniture so we could have somewhere to be and I tried to clean as much of the dust as I could before they got here.  It was definitely a construction zone! I'm still so grateful my friends still willingly came and helped me with my two kids while Michael was away!
The next three weeks, we basically lived upstairs or on the concrete floor with a couch and a table.  Our garage was full of our furniture and our patio was full of our appliances and kitchen table for outdoor dining! It was pretty intense.

^Before....

^Small example of the enormous amount of dust!

^Living upstairs!

^Trooper number 1 loved her "Stair couch" Cozy, right?

^Meanwhile this trooper turned 6 weeks old!

^Nice kitchen/patio/storage/ work space

^Sure you can paint on the floor...

^My hard working husband getting our appliances plugged back in

^Laila helping her dad cut and paint new baseboards to replace the ones we ripped out.

^ Cleaning carpets and having some people come in and clean the windows and all the main floor felt SOOOO good after weeks of construction and dust!

^....After!

We are used to projects that last maybe a couple of days but this one had us in construction for weeks and it was happening in our main living areas.  It was exhausting.  Because it was so tiring, I definitely appreciate my new floors that much more!  I think it was worth it. (Even if I hated the new tile -which I don't- I would have to live with it because I do not want to repeat that process any time soon.)