Kitchen Floor

We have been without a kitchen floor for a year now. This was the floor when we bought the house:

It matched the actual brick hearth just so well. For some odd reason though, the floor just wasn't for us. Not sure if it was the fact that it was so dirty it was a completely different color underneath the cabinets (so different it looked like a completely different floor) or the fact that it was just flat out hideous.

I first started tearing it up in September of last year. Thanks to a heat wave, I didn't get much done. I got back at it after Christmas, using a Christmas present from my mom. It is not fun work. R kept telling me I was wasting my time. He felt that it would be okay to put the new floor over the lovely brick. I, for some reason, just wanted it gone.

So this has been my kitchen floor for the past 9 months.... That's four kinds of flooring you're seeing there.. Brick, brick underlayment, another type of brick, and dirty nasty plywood. Nice, huh?

In May I got a quote from a contractor I work with to tear up the existing plywood (with brick) and the original sub-floor that is underneath. They would then put down either some new plywood or the existing plywood. While this seems pointless, it would make it so that our kitchen floor isn't raised up 2" from the other rooms. While the quote was very very fair, it was just too much for us to spend right now. We're still considering this..

We did make a step in the whole "get S an actual floor" process. We actually picked out a floor! That we like! And won't look fake. Pretty much every floor we found in our price range just looked ridiculous next to our 240 year old 20" wide floors.

This floor is Bruce's Cliffton Plank Cherry. It's a 5" wide 3/8" engineered hardwood. It can be glued down or installed as a floating floor. It can also be installed on plywood, wood, concrete or vinyl flooring.

We had narrowed it down to 3 different color choices. Copper Kettle (shown above), Sangria and Ponderosa. After having the samples sitting on our kitchen floor for about 3 weeks, and asking everyone who came to our house, we finally decided on Copper Kettle. It goes well with the Living Room and Dining Room floors (which are different colors), but doesn't exactly match, which is good because it doesn't look like we were trying to match it exactly. It also looks great with our kitchen table and my baking cabinet, which both have cherry tops.