dining room day four

The moment of truth is here: laying down the floor tile! This was our first time doing self-adhesive tiles, so we weren’t sure if it would be as easy as it looks. It turns out that it pretty much was.

We started off by finishing some last bits of paint. This is the totally profesh way we reached the corner above the stairs, btw: duct tape an old paint brush to the end of the extendable handle.

Hey, it worked!

We followed the tile instructions and calculated the center of the room. However, this left us needing teensy tiny bits on either side, and we wanted to avoid (a) more cuts than necessary and (b) having little bitty pieces on the edge where the room steps down into the fireplace room. So we slid things over just slightly so we could start with a full tile on the step side.

This means we didn’t follow the instructions exactly, as they want you to start with the center tile and work from there. But we figured that this way we would be exactly ON with the edge tiles, and since the room isn’t that big to begin with, we figured it would be okay. (Spoiler alert: it was.)

We continued from there in the prescribed stair-step fashion. Despite K’s expression above, it actually went really smoothly.

So much fun! (Not really. But not that bad. Pretty easy compared to a lot of the DIY projects we’ve done.)

Pretty soon we were almost halfway done!

We still need to tile the step up into the kitchen, where you can now see just how dingy the old flooring looks in comparison.

Just to recap, here’s the before picture:

And the after:

What a great transformation! The room is so much lighter and brighter now. And it feels cleaner. I mean, it IS cleaner, but the overall vibe of the room is just much tidier and more of a place you’d want to eat dinner. It took us about three hours to do all the tiling for this room. Not too shabby! One thing that kept us moving at a good pace is K’s ability to cut out the tricky bits around corners really efficiently. He’s just super good at that stuff.

Next we’ll work on the vent covers for the step between rooms, and put up a threshold corner thingie along the whole edge.

We need to put up trim again and a few other finishing details, but the room is really coming together! This leads me to my next item of business: the ceiling fan.

Before, I looked at it and thought, it’s not great but it’s not horrible, and ceiling fans are supposed to be selling points, right? But now I am feeling less and less like it should stay. It’s dated and nothing else in the room/house is that finish. We also never use the fan part, it hangs really low into the room, and it provides very little actual light. So, with what kind of fixture should we replace it? Anyone seen any cool ones? I’m also going to replace the curtains in here, since the old ones were super cheapies that have faded really badly and are now three or four distinct shades of green. Ideas for those welcome, too!