Problems and Solutions

The kitchen renovation is moving slowly forward. 

The floor has been a stumbling block, it has areas where the old tile have lifted, broken, and left holes in the tile floor.  Unfortunately the 9 by 9 inch tile size and the age of the tile means it is probably vinyl asbestos.  Sigh current recommendation for this type of floor is to leave it in place and float a floor over it if it is in good shape.  Well most of ours is but there are those two damaged areas....  and those areas have seemed to be an insolvable problem.   

If our floor was on a slab the recommendation to use a self leveling flooring compound would work but our floor is on top of a wood floor on top of a wood subfloor.  Our damaged areas are bare wood so anything liquid you put on them would cause problems as the wood absorbs the moisture from the liquid and then swells.  This would cause more tiles to lift and break which would totally defeat the purpose of the self leveling compound.  

Today a salesman at Menards had another suggestion.  This wonderful man suggested we find a tile that is the same thickness as our old tiles and use a modern adhesive to use the new tiles to patch our holes forming a level floor ready for us to install a floating floor system of our choice.   :-) Tomorrow we will start looking for cheap tile of the right size.

So with the floor problem hopefully solved we again looked at various floating floor options.  Sigh once again product weakness and our house design conspired against us to limit our choices.    We have lovely large windows on the south and the west side of our kitchen/breakfast nook.   That area gets lots of sun during the summer months.   The vinyl laminate floating tiles we had first chosen have a problem with sunlight and heat on them but there is another workable solution for our kitchen a floating porcelain tile system.  We need to do a bit more research but for now this is what we will be going with.

recycled kitchen...

WOW! It has been a long time since we did anything in the house but within the last month we have had some more movement on my projects.   First off the stove stopped working, wry grin it is only 23 years old but instead of trying to repair it we opted to buy a new more efficient stove that will work better with the way we cook now.    Removing the old stove revealed how bad off the kitchen really is.  So off we went to look into options.   Working with the designers at a couple of big box stores we came up with a much more workable layout then the current one. 

 

Then we found some discontinued unfinished cabinets on sale for 20% off  AND we found all the cabinets we needed for our new plan :) total cost under $500 a much sweeter price then the over 2 grand price we were being quoted for the low end pre-finished cabinets.  

The counter tops will be a fairly new Formica laminate called Travertine Silver that very successfully mimics the Silver Travertine tile I had fallen in love with.   Sigh it is a special order but is still less then the other options we explored for the counter tops. 

Back splash will eventually be glass tiles.  Floors probably vinyl in planks or squares depending on if we go for a wood or stone look on the floor....  Toli is leaning towards a hickory color/pattern while I am still being transfixed by those lovely stones imposters.