No we don’t know how to play instruments, and we’re not tearing it up musically, but we did tear it up this past weekend. We tore up our ceramic tile floor to prepare for our new wood floors that we will be installing.

I’ve expressed before how the existing tile in our house was not my style. at all. I’ve always had wood floors in our home growing up as a kid and I’ve learned to love them. Yes you have to be a bit more careful with them, but the look is so classic and we knew it would be great for resale.

We originally picked out a dark bamboo wood floor from Home Depot and we purchased it in November. However, a lot of time had passed and as we got closer to installing it, it just wasn’t sitting well with me. I checked Home Depot’s site to read new reviews on the wood, and I was right, this wood was not holding up well to normal daily use. What also didn’t help was my sister sending me videos of my niece playing with toys on their wood floor and all I could think about was our future kids ruining our wood floor. Luckily Home Depot allowed me to return it for merchandise credit and we purchased a new wood floor from Menards. The new flooring we purchased was the same stuff that my sister and another friend put in, and it was holding up extremely well. It’s one of those hand-scarped floors and is also dark in color.

If you know me I tend to worry a lot, so having one less thing to worry about feels great. And we’ll probably just use the HD credit on our countertops anyways.

So back to the tile… it had to go. So Drew borrowed a tool from work that would tear up the tile piece of cake. For the most part, it was a piece of cake. What really helped was that the tile was laid on top of vinyl. That helped for a nice clean removal of the cement board. It took us 3 hours to remove 95% off the kitchen tile. However there was a section in our hallway (connected to the kitchen) that we assume had carpet installed, instead of the vinyl. That 5% literally took us 2 hours to remove – the cement board was stuck like glue to the wood sub floor.

So after cleaning up (well there is still much more dusting to do), here is how our kitchen floor looks. The vinyl is ok enough to live with until my dad has a chance to help us with the wood floors (hopefully soon?!). We removed all the nails we could, and hammered in the ones we couldn’t.

The area that had carpet in previously we laid towels over since it was very bumpy and not nice to walk on. It’s not the best scenario, but we are flexible and can live with it.

Oh wood floor my feet can’t wait to walk all over you! And I wasn’t kidding when I said I still had to dust… oh the joys or home renovations (and no that is not normal dust, that is concrete dust… I’m not that bad at cleaning)!