Our Kitchen Renovation: The Floor

Our Kitchen Renovation: The Floor

One of the biggest dilemmas I had when it came to designing our kitchen renovation was about the floor. Since our goal is to have an open living room/kitchen space, I was dead set on having one continual floor between the two. And in a perfect world that floor would be wide-planked, light-colored hardwood like this or this … sigh.

Our living room already has wood floors, though — narrow planked red oak in what our floor guy called an “old-fashioned” stain — and the floors extend up the stairs and through all of the upstairs bedrooms. They aren’t the wide planks I love, but they’re FINE and we’re lucky to have them. So there’s no way we’re going to replace a whole house of wood. We talked to our floor guy about matching our existing wood to go in the kitchen, but his estimate was something upwards of $8,000 which is just so not in the budget.

Andy and I debated options over and over. I hemmed and hawed and pouted. Andy argued that he liked the idea of a separate floor in the kitchen because it creates more of a delineation between the spaces that could otherwise feel almost too open. Legitimate argument. We looked at a ton of kitchens on pinterest and decided that we like the look of dark grey, slate-like floors, like these:

Left to right: 1. via DustJacketAttic | 2. via MyDomaine | 3. via pinterest (original source link isn’t working) | 4. via YoungHouseLove (not a kitchen, but you get the point)

In January we packed up a few-week-old Joey and took her to her first trip to The Tile Shop to check out our options. But when we looked at all the darker grey tile, we just weren’t feeling it, and, unexpectedly, some lighter greys kept catching our eyes. This was our favorite:

It’s a nice, soft grey, but it has dimension, depth and texture which will be a nice complement to our glossy white cabinets. And, you guys, it’s only $2.49 a square foot!!! We love the idea of doing something totally different than our old kitchen, which was black and white.

We chose grout in a complementary light grey color called “whisper grey.”

This new tile will go throughout the kitchen, down the stairs into the entryway hallway AND through the half-bath. That’s a lot of tile… 2,100 pounds of tile, actually! Eesh. Andy lifted it all himself. It took him three trips in our Ford Escape to bring all the tile home and pile it up in the garage.

I’m so excited to see it done! We don’t know when our renovation will get started, though. Our cabinets were supposed to be delivered last Monday and construction start this upcoming weekend, but when we called Ikea to check on our delivery we were told that one of our cabinets is out of stock so they aren’t going to ship anything out until it’s available again. Um, you probably could have warned us instead of just not showing up, Ikea … So they don’t have a time estimate and we will just wait with fingers crossed that it happens soon!