Back Breaking Workout

Yesterday was brutal. Hard, labor-intensive, back-breaking work that lasted like 12 hours! But I’m not complaining because we are half way done with the kitchen floor! A little background: Michael bought his house a few years before I met him. He bought it with the plan to update and modernize it and then eventually sell it. Before we met he installed the hardwood floors in the rest of the house all by himself. They are gorgeous! Not long after we started dating, I helped him destroy the old retro-heinous-70’s kitchen all the way down to the sub-flooring.

We have a working kitchen now, with the new cabinets installed. We just don’t have a floor. We also have the old retro-heinous-70’s baby blue counter-top still. 🙂 For various reasons we didn’t work on the kitchen very much in last two years. Well, we finally have tile installed on half of the kitchen floor! It took all day yesterday and I’m sore and tired today but HAPPY!

Yesterday Before:

Before

Yesterday after 12 hours of work:

After

There’s still a LOT to do. It’s a huge space. The dining room and kitchen are all one room but divided by the counter space. We still need to do the kitchen section, the pantry and then we’ll have to rent a wet saw to cut the tiles to fit around the edge of the room.

We worked hard yesterday. There was a lot of prep work, measuring, double-checking. Michael did the mixing of the adhesive:

He spread the adhesive on the sub-flooring (it’s the picture above that looks like sheet rock on the floor) and I laid the tiles and made sure they lined up and the spacers fit, etc. It was a lot of stretching, standing, bending, twisting….OUCH!

After all the tiles are glued in, we’ll do the grout and sealant. Then we’ll have a real floor!!!! YIPPEE!!!

Since we were working on the kitchen, we had to get “fast” food. For lunch we went to Burgerville. It’s really cool that they post the calories on their receipts:

Very cool! Although my complaint is that they should probably post the calories somewhere in the restaurant BEFORE people order….I usually base my order on calories. I got the Classic Burger without cheese and it was about 500 calories.

After lunch we headed back to the house and continued the flooring. When we stopped working late Saturday night, I picked up a deLite Pizza from Papa Murphy’s and cooked that for a quick dinner.

And we toasted our hard work with a little drink:

I took a hot bath with Lavender Epsom Salts before bed. It was lovely!

This morning I made pancakes! I’ve never successfully made pancakes in the past….either they were too burned or raw! Bummer. But this morning was a success!