Flooring and Kitchens

Having knocked a couple of small "activity" goals off already this year it is time to really get to work on the major renovation/repair activity that is planned for this year and that is replacing the kitchen and 1/3 of the floor in the house.

My lovely wife is a keen researcher when it comes to buying things and likes to know that the decision "we" are making is the right one. So before christmas last year we started to talk seriously about new floors and replacing the kitchen. Truth be told we have been talking about re-doing the kitchen for nearly 3 years but as with many things in our house it doesn't always move quickly. Sometimes we suffer analysis paralysis and other times we just lose focus. Since this year is, for me, about maintaining focus and not procrastinating I've been pushing a bit and we are getting very close to making decisions and outlaying money.

I completely ripped out old kitchen out about 12 -13 years ago and built a new one from scratch then laid cork tiles though a large part of the house a year or so later. The tiles are showing wear and damage in places and the preparation was not in truth all it should have been so there are some "off" patches in places where the substrate has molded to uneven sections of the underlying floor.

The plan is to pull the cork floor up from the living areas and leave it in the hallways. Fix the uneven bits of the underfloor (also a floor that I laid after pulling slate tiles up around 14 years ago) and rip the kitchen out. Then "we" will lay Blackbutt flooring (probably) and put a new kitchen with essentially the same layout as the existing one but with more drawers and factory finish doors/fronts with soft close and push to open hardware. The guy from Monaro Timbers came out and talked to us about flooring options and suggested that we don't need to pull up the existing underfloor, just make sure that the major inconsistencies caused by the house being extended and doors being where they weren't originally placed are fixed up. This was welcome news and will mean that getting a new floor down can be done a little slower than planned since it means we won't have gaping holes in the floor for days on end while the new floor goes down.

So today we re-measured the kitchen cabinets and confirmed the units that we wanted to get (flatpack of course) and will send away a request for quote tomorrow. The aim is to get the cabinets built well in advance of the old kitchen being pulled out and probably while the flooring is acclimatizing in the house (should be two or more weeks with 50 square meters of flooring cluttering up the family room). In the next couple of days we will get final quotes on flooring and then we are off!

Timeframe sees us getting the floor laid in the 2nd or 3rd week of May, hopefully before it gets too cold outside thus requiring us to run the heating all day and drying the wood out before it is laid.