If you read my last post, you saw the first part of our house featuring lighting updates and upgrades weāve made over the years.Ā Today Iām sharing the updated flooring throughout our home and including our patio.
We are the third owners of our home and it was about ten years old when we purchased it.Ā It had brown carpeting in the great room and bedrooms, and sort of ugly tile with stained grout throughout the rest of the house.Ā Apparently dogs that werenāt well trained had lived here at some time and that carpet was the first thing to go.
Hard Wood
We decided to replace all the carpet with hard wood and, in my opinion, it is the most impactful update weāve made. People always comment on how stunning all the wood is when they enter our front door.
If I were to do it again, I might use the ceramic tile that looks like wood or the vinyl wood because we do have termites.Ā Luckily weāve had no trouble so far, though. We chose engineered hard wood that has been distressed. Shiny hard wood is beautiful, but it shows any tiny amount of dirt and any small nick. That is not for the way we live our lives though.
We feel that replacing the carpet is healthier and cleaner.Ā We have changed our area rugs over the years to match our changing styles which is much more fun than replacing wall-to-wall carpet.
The Nolan Persian Rug from Pottery Barn is in our family room. I’m not an affiliate but linked for convenience.
Ceramic Tile
Several years later, we bit the bullet and had all the tile removed. It was a big and traumatic and messy job. We opted to continue the hard wood throughout most of the house, including the kitchen. For the laundry room and bathrooms we chose a marble-look ceramic tile.
White grout will never live in my house again. Ā Once the grout gets stained, itās impossible to get white again.Ā We had it professionally cleaned (very expensive). I used bleach, toilet bowl cleaner, peroxide.Ā Basically every trick in the book didnāt get all the grout looking good and after a while it was all I could see when I looked at my floor. Now our ceramic tile has small grout lines with gray grout.
In our master bath you can see we continued the marble look into our shower and used real marble mosaic in the shower pan.Ā It turned out great.
Vintage Cement Tile
We love the look of vintage patterned cement tile (which is actually ceramic), but a little goes a long way and Iām not sure how long it will be in style. We opted to do our small powder room in that. Itās lovely and thatās quite enough.
Since the toilet paper roll made such a statement in this picture, I feel like I should have folded the corner into a point like the Marriott does.
Brick Pavers
Outdoors, we had horrible stamped concrete which was flaking and cracking. There were stone flag pavers loosely placed around huge boulders. It was dangerous to walk on and basically unusable. I moved to Arizona to spend as much time outside as possible, so our adding brick pavers to our patio and front porch were among the first upgrade projects we did.
Bottom line is that the flooring we chose is probably the biggest wow-factor we achieved in remodeling projects.Ā Everything we chose is really pretty and easy to maintain.
What I’m Reading
My posts have been pretty long lately so I havenāt written many book reviews. On audio I listened to Thunder Bay by William Kent Krueger. This is the next installment of the Cork OāConner mysteries. It satisfied my need for adventure while getting outdoors exercise. Mission accomplished. There were no big words I had to look up which is also a plus.
In print I am reading The Obesity Code by Jason Fung, MD.Ā I listened to this on audio about a year ago, but I am revisiting it after DF Jill and I were discussing the benefits of intermittent fasting on inflammation and pain control.Ā I know the arthritis in my hands benefits greatly and I am ready to take it to the next level.
For the record, I am not obese, do not think Iām obese and am not interested in losing weight. I am interested in how eating affects hormones and how I can increase my health from that understanding.
Too much non-fiction wears me down so I started the new Veronica Roth, Chosen Ones. I read her YA Divergent series several years ago. They were pretty good, but mainly I read them because I loved the Hunger Games series so much. Iām pretty newly into this book, and will reserve judgment until Iām finished, but I can say that using the F word in the first paragraph seems to make a statement that itās not a YA and worthy of something greater. I donāt know about that. Felt a bit gratuitous to me and lord knows Iām not against the F word. I never get offended when Stephen King uses it.
By the way, I loved reading Hunger Games, Iām not loving living it so much though. Enough already! This is a call to action for a bit of civility and a lot of love. Sending you peace and grace this week.