This is the only before pic I have of the kitchen. You can see stains from two rooms over. We had fun there, obviously, but I hated people to see the walls."Uh, Shelly?" My husband was slouching in an attempt to make himself appear smaller and giving me puppy dog eyes, a sure sign that he had picked up on my foul mood and was sure I wouldn't like what he was about to tell me. "We're going to have to do a patchwork job with the flooring in the laundry room."
"What? Why?" I exclaimed, jumping to my feet and rushing to the room in question, as though my fervor in the matter could make more vinyl flooring appear. When I got there, though, my words surprised everyone.
"I like it. Let's do it."
I had taken ownership of the house when I was twenty-two. My parents owned it and were fed up with bad renters, so they agreed to let me take over the mortgage on the condition that I allow my younger brother to live with me. I immediately started dreaming of all the possibilities this ancient, leaky, adobe house offered. I would do all the work myself and then sit back and enjoy a cocktail while marveling over all I had accomplished. By the time my husband moved in, almost three years after I had, I realized I had accomplished very little. But my husbands constant mantra of "let's do it" renewed my dreams. We discussed all the rooms of the house and decided to start with the kitchen and the laundry room - both in need of a coat or five of paint (thanks to those mystery stains that stubbornly remain as the paint around them is scrubbed off) and new flooring (the existing floor was peeling, cracked, and also resistant to scrubbing). We decided on red for the kitchen walls and cappuccino for the laundry room, buying Behr (www.behr.com) brand paint with hopes that it would cover the stains and a rolled up sheet of black and white flooring that we were told would cover the kitchen and laundry room floors with enough left over for the bathroom. I had images of myself in a tea-length dress, cooking dinner in my perfect kitchen with nary a hair out of place - I was going to be a tattooed June Cleaver.
We started on a Thursday afternoon, moving all our large appliances into the living room. The first upset was the realization that they didn't want us to disconnect our propane stove and we'd have to make do with jacks and having people lift it to get the flooring underneath. We covered the stove with a tarp and got to painting the kitchen. To my delight, the paint worked as advertised and it took a single coat to cover the stains that had taunted me. We were off to a great start! The next morning, we ripped up the flooring and discovered the second upset - a huge batch of mold where the old flooring had been peeling. We saturated it with mold remover, which worked surprisingly well, and I moved on to painting the laundry room while the guys (my husband, our roommate, and a good friend) began laying the flooring in the kitchen.
By the time Saturday rolled around, we all had assumed we'd be done already and patience was wearing thin. I was eager to remove the chaos from my living room and the boys were eager to just be done and get to playing video games. Then we realized that through either a math error or a miscommunication with the gentleman who sold it to us, we had barely enough vinyl to finish the floor in the laundry room and most of it was in pieces. And that's where this story started.
This was our first DIY project. It's not perfect, but neither are we. When I look at that floor, I think about all the love that went into it. I can't be June Cleaver - she never worked two jobs, never lived with her brother and a roommate in addition to her husband, and she certainly never indulged in DIY home improvement. Maybe I'll become more like June Cleaver some day, but right now, I'm embracing the perfect imperfections of the life and home that I love, celebrating our new kitchen with brats, good beer, great company, and bad karaoke.
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