The Kitchen and Sundry, Part 1

Let's see how blogging on the regular goes. I have the timer set for 15 minutes. Right now, Sam and Marian are wrestling loudly at my feet, Ella is yelling and keeps pulling my laptop away, Dave is ripping out flooring, and I am not looking for Olivia's math book which has inexplicably disappeared since Tuesday. Onward.

I said the kitchen floor is being ripped out. Why? you wonder. This story starts awhile back in 2007 when we bought the house out of foreclosure. The previous owners used our house as a rental. The renters had animals. The animals left messes. The owners were foreclosed on. They didn't clean up the animal mess. The floors in the house were trashed and all had to be replaced (and all the subfloors scrubbed and primed). Well, we had just spent all our money buying the house. It was at the top of our affordability range. We didn't have much left for remodeling, and yet we needed to do a bunch of remodeling. 

Inexplicably, the kitchen was half carpet. I had dreams of putting hardwood down in the kitchen. But we were poor and could not afford hardwood. I may have been poor, but I was also a snob. I was not buying laminate, I sniffed.

We searched out a flooring that wasn't quite hardwoods but certainly wasn't laminate, and ran into engineered flooring, which was sold as being the best of both worlds. The look of hardwood with the ease of laminate. More expensive than laminate, but cheaper than hardwood. I was sold. Dave and his father installed it themselves.

Soon we discovered we had made a stupid, stupid mistake. The floor did not wear well at all. The top clear coat peeled at the slightest contact with water. It was obvious the floor would have to be replaced before we moved, but we weren't moving anytime soon so we did what everyone does when you don't have money to replace items. You just live with it. Besides we had a gaggle of children who took no particular care so may as well let them destroy the floor we have before putting in something shiny for whomever gets the house next.

Time is up. To Be Continued.