Just a word of warn­ing before you read fur­ther that this post is one of those “only a mother could love” ones about our daily lives. The kind of post come­di­ans like to poke fun of where I will try (hope­fully not in vain) to make an inter­est­ing read out of the unin­ter­est­ing topic of our daily lives. Consider your­self warned.

It all started a cou­ple weeks ago when our kitchen sink began to drain less and less. The dish­washer would defy grav­ity and drain UP into both sinks mak­ing us try and drain them both by play­ing a game sim­i­lar to the water-puzzle in Die Hard 3. After 2 bot­tles of drain-o didn’t work, we called a exor­cist plumber. He installed a new drain pipe under­neath the house and relieved us of some bur­den­some money weigh­ing down our bank account.
Even after all that, we were still hav­ing prob­lems of water leak­ing some­where between the brand new pipes and the sink. *sigh*
Not want­ing to con­tribute any more to the plumber’s kids’ col­lege fund, my father and I decided it best to take out the cab­i­net with the sink and fix it our­selves. Unfortunately, this also meant we had to face the project we had been doing our best to avoid for many months: replac­ing our entire kitchen floor…again! We had already replaced our kitchen floors shortly after buy­ing the house. Unfortunately, we used a floor­ing sys­tem that com­prised of inter­lock­ing wood lam­i­nate with stone tile glued to the top. It worked great for a while but our house is on pylons, not a slab, so the flex­ing of the floors broke the tile over time. Moral of the story is not to buy prod­ucts Lowes is dis­con­tin­u­ing for rea­sons they won’t tell you about.

Friday, we took out all of the kitchen stuff, appli­ances, cab­i­nets and placed them Tetris-style in our din­ing room. We also stripped out the old tile reveal­ing the dis­gust­ing linoleum that usu­ally lies dor­mant in the dark­ness under­neath our real floor­ing.
BEHOLD THE LURKING HORROR!!!

Yes folks, the Time-Machine of Uglyness revealed much that day. That’s not one, not two, but three nasty floor­ing choices the pre­vi­ous own­ers slapped down over the decades. I don’t even want to know what things looked like with that eye-searing yel­low all over the place. *shud­ders*
Anywhoo, Saturday and Sunday were spent cov­er­ing the nas­ti­ness with a layer of ply­wood we screwed into the floor to pre­vent soft spots and some nice ceramic tile. The pho­tos I took don’t show off the col­ors very well but the tile is a nice mix­ture of dark grey with some sub­tle reds. That may sound funky but the grey blends in well with the metal appli­ances while the red warms up the wood cabinetry.

You still with me? Almost done here.
The best part of this whole thing (besides being done) was the plumb­ing prob­lem turned out to just be with the pipe that came straight out of the wall under the sink. All we did was cut a new PVC one, screw it on and BOOM! Problem solved. I love it when a plan comes together.
There’s some more stuff about how fix­ing a sin­gle tile in our bath­room turned into 4 tiles, how we now have a proper pantry, and how my shoul­ders hurt so bad on Monday that my stom­ach felt sick but I’ve said enough. You did a good job read­ing this far. Rub your sore eyes and get your­self a glass of some­thing cool and refreshing.