DIY Kitchen Makeover: New Floors

In my DIY Kitchen Makeover the first thing we did was replace our tile floor. I have always loved the idea of having a white kitchen. And by white kitchen, I mean having white cabinets, a pretty gray tile floor and white marble countertop, and silver finishes.

I have always like the looked of a seamless timeless kitchen. Something about having white cabinets makes it seem so clean.

As a momma with three young kids, I know you have got to be thinking, why on earth would I want white. I don’t know, I just do. Even my kids think white is my favorite color.

Finding inspiration….

This style of “white light and bright” home decor came about a couple of years ago for me. And as I’ve mentioned before, I’ve slowly been moving around the home to add this “flavor” of mine throughout. And yes, I’ve jumped in on the farmhouse wagon in some of my decorating style, because, well I like it.

And it’s all about making your house a home, and loving your space.

The Floors

So our first part to this kitchen makeover was the floors. While the standard builder grade wasn’t completely awful, it just wasn’t something we loved. It was beige, and 16X16 square tiles. Again, nothing wrong with that, but grout was aged and dirty. And we had a few cracked pieces so it was time to finally tell goodbye and let it go.

Just look at this brown on brown kitchen. To even be fair when I took this picture, it was actually darker. I lightened it to put in the blog, so in reality, it was darker than this in real life. Meh!

We, and by we, I mean my husband mostly, took large hammers and beat out big pieces of the tile. Then we would push and sweep most of to a corner. Once we had a big pile of cracked broken tile we would shovel it to a wheel barrow and carry it to the back bed of his truck for dumping.

This portion of the job for the entire kitchen was about a day. Not a whole day, but if you are doing this, plan an entire day for rest and breaks in between. It is the hardest part of the job, and yes, if you don’t properly lift and shovel it can be back breaking.

We also bought the same tile for our kids bathrooms. I didn’t take the best pics during the kitchen tile removal so I am showing a few form the bathrooms since it is essentially the same process.

Removing the thin set

So, on the following day we rented a machine that basically jack hammers out the thin set of the prior tile. This is the mud or cement stuff that holds you tile in place. It is kid of like sanding a concrete floor making it all smooth again.

This happens pretty quickly, but it is very dusty. Make sure you sweep frequently. I held our shop vac right close to the jack hammer blade to minimize dust. Just a pro tip for ya!! (We’re not really pros – lol).

Once the floor was all bare and smooth we were ready for the new tile. So a new layer of thin set was mixed up and hubs used his past tiling skills to lay the new tiles.You can pay for this all to be done by pros, but by doing it ourselves we saved a ton of money on labor.

I’ve seen my husband do tile work a handful of times now, and if you are a little DIY savvy it seems that it could be easy to learn.

We let the tile dry over night and the day he grouted our floors. For the tile I choose a pretty rectangle gray from Floor & Decor and a darker gray grout to minimize dirt. Even though we did all of this work, this was by far the biggest expense of the entire kitchen project.

I think it is because I fell in love with this particular tile. The name of it is Irvington Park Gray. I linked a similar one above.

I really love how the new floors turned out and think this new tile is much more durable than the last. It seems to be thicker which makes me believe it will hold up longer.

I am not so sure if that is the case when it comes to tile, but I am okay with thinking such. LOL Just look how pretty and so much lighter the space is already!!

Tomorrow, I will post our cabinet paint transformation, so come back then to see the difference. You won’t want to miss it.

DIY Kitchen Makeover: New Floors