It was really bad….

It's at this point, you know you can't go back

Before it got a little better. Our kitchen was one of the more usable rooms in the house, but we didn’t really like it. We started by finding some really inexpensive tile about a year ago. For less than $100, we thought we could transform the current kitchen to a slightly prettier version that we could live in for about five years.

Our ultimate goal is to build a new kitchen in the current dining room and make the current kitchen a small dining room. But, I’m getting ahead of myself. Let’s back up to the simple tile purchase that got this project rolling.

Tiny, pretty 1 x 2” glass tiles on 12 x 12” mats. Did I mention that I’ve never tiled? Ever. Clearly, that hasn’t stopped us before, but this was our kitchen that we would use every day, multiple times a day. Not a roof that is far, far away from our daily lives.

I looked at videos online and books that we had on the shelves and realized that they all had very good, but conflicting advice. Off to the big box store for supplies. Grout, trowels, tile snips and the like. I tried the snips on the tiles with no luck. They are glass – they shatter. A tile saw was the only solution with a special blade for glass. It was my Christmas gift – the one and only thing I asked for.

Yeah, I’m a dreamer. But, I am in love with the tile saw. It worked and I still have all of my fingers. A Christmas miracle because you have to get pretty close to that blade with these little bitty tiles.

Action shot

Nice, right? And it was loud and wet and dirty and GLORIOUS. But I should have been wearing a hat: it would have kept the glass pieces out of my hair and also hidden that great style I was sporting while standing out in the freezing cold cutting tiles with no gloves (the water plus tile made for a slippery mess).

Kitchen renovations are no place for the vain, so I continued.

The transformation was almost instant. Even when I just taped up the tile to see what it may look like, it was dramatic. So much better than the layers of random wallpaper from before (go figure). The tile is done, but while I was waiting for grout to dry, I started painting and other fun things. A work in progress, but there has been progress.