It's happening. The eyeball-assaulting tile is no more.
It's taken two weeks so far. Two weeks of cement dust, having our fridge in the hall and having to put a bloody bra on every day inside my own damn house while we have guys working on it but it will be worth it!
I must admit I'm a bit pissed off at how long it's taking. I thought it'd be a day of removing the old tile, then a day or two to lay the new ones and stick the new skirting on, and in total that is all it will add up to....if the goddamn builders would stick around for more than an hour at a time to finish the damn thing!!! Now, they assure me that it's because they can only do a section at a time as they have to let the adhesive dry before standing on it, but I'm calling bullshit on that. Other jobs is what's stopping them spending a full day here. The boom is on it's way back guys, mark my words!
We currently have a finished floor, but the backsplash is still in bits and the skirting is still missing with no set day for it to be finished so I may kill somebody yet. The guys seem to have realised this as they've switched to calling Gavin. Smart move.
Note to builders: I have zero time for your shit right now. Zero time. And if you keep looking at me like I'm crazy for the things I'm asking for or make one more decision without actually asking me first I'm going to vent my pregnant lady super-rage all over you.
So it's not exactly the quick makeover I thought I'd get by actually paying someone else to do it, but it is happening, and I know it'll be great when it's finished. It's already a million times better.
So what did we pick? If you read my previous post about choosing flooring for in here you'll know that I really, really wanted a wood floor in here, and I had brought home a lot of samples before settling on a lovely dark-toned matte wood effect laminate. However, this decision was based on the assumption that we would be re-doing the entire ground floor, not just the kitchen and utility. You see, we currently have a solid wood floor in the living room and hall, and while it isn't the colour I would choose that's fix-able, but we were told that the gaps that have opened up between some of the boards weren't. We were basically told that there wasn't anything that could be done with these gaps, and they really bother me because a LOT of dirt gets trapped in them, and some of them are huge!!!! So we thought the whole thing had to go, and we were planning to replace it all with a nice, affordable laminate. Not my dream floor of course, but we don't plan on being in this house forever so we couldn't justify the expense of a better wood floor, even if we could afford it.
So we were all ready to go, believing our builder, when I thought, "you know what? I'll just quickly google how to diy fix a wood floor". Spoiler alert, it can be done folks, and easily. So obviously we weren't then going to chuck out a great quality floor to replace it with a pretty crappy one, and consequently I couldn't put laminate in the kitchen, cos it wouldn't match. So the decision was effectively made for me, tile it was!
And after many visits to all the tile emporiums Limerick has to offer I realised that they were all very expensive and I am basically poor. Thankfully I finally found "World of Tiles" and they had a really good selection in my price range. (not an ad or anything by the way, just my genuine experience) I chose a nice rectangular, cement-y looking tile called "Phoenix Gris" and got a light grey grout to match. I'm really happy with it, and I can't wait to show you the finished product....if I don't murder the lads installing it before it ever gets to that stage.
