Ok as promised, (awhile ago) here are the pictures Melissa took at Dad's 87th Birthday party. They are in no order. Enjoy!

It is just flooring...right?

So Mike and I have talked about putting a hardwood floor in the kitchen and the Front Room entry way for years. So last year we started looking at flooring. We found the one we loved at Floor & Decor. It was Mike that picked it and said it was "the one", surprise...because it was one of the more expensive flooring choices. We chose a dark hickory stained engineered hard wood. Pretty, right?

The problem was that it looked terrible next to our builder's grade oak cabinets,

So here was where the plan that developed into more...we would pull up the ugly tile that I have wanted to get rid of almost since we moved in. Here is a good look at the off white 12" tiles with the disgusting grout that I could not ever get clean.

The next plan was to sand and paint the cabinets an off white, then give the kitchen, family room and living room a new coat of paint. I chose a nice tan color for the living room. It went on without any troubles. It even covered up the dark green wall I had painted a few years ago. It looks so much bigger with the lighter paint color. But the colors I chose for the kitchen were awful! We painted two coats of what looked like a nice yellow on the paint chip, but when it was on the walls I hated it. Leslie put it into context by saying, it was the color of Macaroni and Cheese! And she was right. I begged Mike for a do over and he said yes. I picked out a shade lighter than we painted the living room and started repainting. This is where the oops, happened. I was doing just a quick touch up around the fireplace and I took a tumble off the ladder and made a trip the the quick care! This is a subject for another post, another time but, lets just say that I ended up needing meniscus surgery and repair to the ligaments in my left knee. That slowed our progress considerably! When I fell I ended up with paint all over  me and the carpet. Leslie cleaned and cleaned but there was so much that we could not get it out. So something new to add to the plan new carpet!

Here are a few more pictures. I will include before and during pictures of the kitchen/family room and living room.

Our flooring installer talked us into replacing this worn out vinyl in the bathroom, by giving us an excellent deal on the install. I found the tile at Floor and Decor.

 I did get the cabinets sanded and painted before my mishap.

It was a big job, I had to move everything out of the cabinets, since we had furniture piled in the family room and living room, the kitchen stuff all went upstairs.

The tile was removed...

and the carpet in the entry way

Then the flooring started going in: and me? I am sitting on the couch with my leg propped up and in a brace.

Because our house was built in the 1990's, we had the old style hinges on our kitchen cabinets that show on the outside, and to make it worse they were this horrible brass color. I looked into replacements and soon discovered that it would be more than $250.00 to replace all of them! So my solution was found on the Internet again...A $4.95 can of metallic spray paint! You can see in the second picture they were soon a pewter color to match the door pulls we already had.

 The carpet was the next big thing to choose. We made a trip to R.C. Willey for their $39.00 installation sale and came home with 5 carpet samples. This is the one that we chose. It is called "Heart's Desire". Remember this was an unplanned expense so we were only able to re carpet the living room and family room. The rest of the house will have to wait. The carpet went in the day before my knee surgery!

Stay tuned...more progress to come.