24 hour kitchen update

We had no plans for the weekend. John thought he was going to get to relax and watch football. I thought it was the perfect time for us to start tackling the kitchen.

I won.

I've been debating for quite awhile about what to do with our little kitchen. There have been numerous times where I thought I had it figured out but when it comes down to spending the money and making it happen, it never pans out. What's hard about kitchen updates is you never know where to draw the line.
If you update the cabinets, should you update the counter tops? then you need to update the sink? and then is it worth updating all the appliances? It feels like one change, leads to many, turning what was supposed to be a small project, into a big one.

Updating the living room floor prompted me into revisiting this kitchen project. The threshold where the new wood floors meet the old linoleum floors looked pretty bad, and it is one of the most walked upon parts of our house. This juncture highlighted how old and worn the kitchen floors were. Not to mention two years ago John and I painted the kitchen a light tan color, but after it dried it looked more like peach. So I figured, if we're going to update the floors, we might as well paint too.
(Like I said, one change, always leads to another...)

Kitchen before

Kitchen before

Now, I didn't want to go spending a ton of money on this. While people say the kitchen is one of the most important rooms for updates when selling your house, I also need to keep in mind, people are not going to buy this place because they want a spacious gourmet kitchen. So the easy and cheap solution was vinyl floor tiles and a new coat of paint.

If you haven't used vinyl floor tiles before, they are great for projects like this. Ridiculously easy to install and relatively inexpensive compared to other flooring options that are out there.
I began my search online for different patterns that were available at Lowes and found this one that got great reviews and seemed to match nicely with the wood. The best part was it was on clearance!
I measured the space to determine how many tiles I would need, since most of these tiles come in 12x12 squares, ended up I needed 90 to complete the kitchen.

I called the store to see if they carried this pattern in stock, they did but it wasn't listed for the clearance price. I shared that it was on sale online and the guy ended up putting 90 tiles on hold for me and only charging $0.25 a square foot! Awesome!!! You know I LOVE a good sale.
Friday night we picked it up along with a gallon of a different (more brown) shade of tan.

The painting went fast since we aren't working with a huge space here. It got a little crowded with the ladder and three of us working together. Someone may have bumped into the wall and was not happy about her new hair color.

A little tip for painting... Have you used one of these gadgets before? it's called the Shur-line Classic Paint Edger. If you haven't, it's worth every penny. You'll never use that blue tape again, it's AMAZING!

We got the first coat of paint completed Friday night and Saturday morning, round two was done. We let it dry, confirmed it was NOT peach and started with the floor tiles. Now for us, it was pretty easy because the existing floor was a 12x12 tile pattern, so we just needed to match up the lines to what they were before. I can imagine this will take longer if you don't have lines to work from. The hardest part was figuring out a pattern to lay the tiles with the design and the places where a full tile wouldn't fit and you needed to make cuts. We used an exacto knife but these tiles were thin enough that I could use scissors for smaller cuts. The tiles already had adhesive on the back so it was a matter of peeling of the protective paper and plopping it down where it needs to go. Ta-da! It's so simple!

Lastly a fresh coat of white paint on the baseboards and we were all done in under 24 hours.
Well worth the $50 bucks for the tiles and paint!

.... but now with the new floors and wall color, the counter tops are looking pretty bad... perhaps they are next... there's always something!