You Floor Me

As I've said before, and will say many times again, there were a lot of parts of our house that were insanely ugly when we bought it.  The kitchen and front hallway floor were absolutely terrible.  Everytime people come over, I always think, please please don't look at my floor.  No matter what we did it never looked clean.  I've mopped it by hand with a rag and a bucket.  I've used paint thinner to try to get the paint off.  Oh yeah, the kitchen floor has paint splatters in random places.  The edges are all curling up because quarter round was never put down around the baseboards.  And there is a huge seam down the side of the kitchen that is peeling up.

That's not even the front hallway though.  The front hallway floor had paint on it (some of that may have been my fault).  The edges were curling up.  And there were gouges, rips, and a giant hole in the flooring.  It was terrible.  And if you came in through the actual front door, it was the first thing you saw.  So, this is what it looked like as of yesterday morning.

If you see all the little dark spots, those are places that were holes that I patched.  There was a probably 3"x1" hole right in front of the kitchen door.  And just look at that floor.  I'm sure it looked nice when it was originally installed in like the early 90s.  Now, not so much.  So after patching, I primed the floor.  I wasn't really sure if I was actually supposed to do that or not, but I figured it couldn't hurt.  The directions said to prime any of the approved subfloor materials.  It also said you could install the tile over pre-existing laminate so I primed it.  

Sadly, a coat of white Sherwin Williams adhesive primer (leftover from painting paneling) makes the floor look a million times better.  And it gave me a nice clean start.  Ready to start putting down flooring.  I usually save big weird projects like this for when my husband is at work but he was smoking ribs and tuna so I didn't feel too bad to start on a big-ish project like this.

So, after less than 3 hours we had a brand new floor.  A lot of the reviews said to set the oven on 170 degrees and heat up the tile adhesive to activate it so the tiles would stick better.  Huge success.  Except the one I heated up too much and ended up very very sticky.  We used Exodus Resilient Tiles from Home Depot.  They are just peel and stick vinyl tiles.  I did lots of research, and these had excellent reviews and were cheap, $1.19/tile.  That means I did the whole front hallway for about $40.  

I'm pretty much in love.  I still need to do quarter round around the edges.  All in all though, seriously huge improvement.  And I was kind of worried how it would look over the places I patched.  I shouldn't have worried, you can't tell at all.  I'm not sure why we waited this long to do that project.  It was cheap and easy and made a HUGE difference.