After a number of years with just exposed OSB subfloor (and a couple of rugs) as the flooring in my kitchen…
It now has (part of) a floor.
Do not be fooled by that picture. It is still mostly this…
I have been avoiding this project for actual years because 1.) I couldn’t find flooring I liked, and 2.) I knew what an extra large pain in the ass putting this floor in was going to be.
There were a lot of good reasons to install wood floors in here (and there was a minute where I almost bought some click-lock floating laminate as a “temporary” floor for both the kitchen and the crazy-pink-tile rooms) but, at the end of the day, I’m not ever going to take my boots off in this part of the house, and tile felt like the right choice for all of the (literal) shit I track in on a daily basis.
Then, instead of continuing The Hunt for Perfect Kitchen Floor Tile (which has been going on for, again, actual years) I just said fuck it and bought some tile through Home Depot online without ever having seen it.
I don’t love it, and I don’t hate it, and it’s not plywood. So. Good enough.
Hilariously, this is how the tile was delivered.
That’s the delivery truck speeding away after leaving my tile in the middle of the road.
This is me, with two tractors, trying desperately to move the tile out of the middle of the road before someone came driving down it. (Also doing it by myself because I was exposed to covid a few days earlier, which, sure enough, started kicking my ass 24 hours after this.)
Every day is an adventure, right?
Anyway, Covid knocked out my plans to get this done in late December, then I started a new job, and somehow in the middle of all of the craziness I decided it would be a good time in my life to spend a month eating off a hot plate. Again.
(Couldn’t even find the actual hot plate I own for times like these…had to use my camp stove.)
In these wonderful times we live in where all possible information you could want on any DIY project is available on YouTube, I won’t spend a lot of time talking about tiling itself, but, two things to note:
First, this orange underlayment I used is the Schluter Ditra uncoupling membrane.
You cannot tile directly over subfloor, and Ditra is the underlayment I found that adds the least possible hight to the tile (only about 3/16″) which was important to me because of the crazy hight differences between all of my floors. (Also, the cats love it, obv.)
Second, the clips you see between the tiles here are the Perfect Levelmaster tile leveling system.
I highly recommend this system for any large format tiles, especially on a subfloor that might not be perfectly level.
And that is it for my tiling advice today. This post is mostly just an excuse to put up a solid before-and-(mostly)-after pic of the kitchen…
As a total aside–and in the spirit of that thing I’ve been preaching about on this website for actual decades… telling an authentic story–I’m struggling a bit (a lot) with what the next chapter is going to be for me, and the farm, and where my life goes next. And as much as telling stories–especually about where I’m stuggling–has been a part of my life, I still have very mixed feelings on telling stories on The Internet these days. (Maybe I’ll go old-school and write a book on actual paper? Who knows. I’ve been hand-writing correspondance recently like a proper luddite, so I wouldn’t put it past me.)
Posts here will continue to be sporadic until I figure it out, but at the very least, all of you who have been on this journey with me for a decade or more deserve to see that the actual kitchen has an actual floor.
(Also, speaking of things that are old and sporadic, if you receive these posts/updates via email, the subscription service I’ve used for years is being shut down, and this will likely be the last post that comes through to your email this way. I’m going to transition to a new system and all of you who are on the existing email list should be ported to the new one, but if you don’t see anything else come via email in the next couple of months and still want to receive new posts, make sure to check back on the actual website for updates, or re-sign-up here.)
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