Happy Monday, guys. I hope all you moms had a wonderful day yesterday. I was so excited to celebrate my very first Mother’s Day, and it was great. We had brunch (with bottomless mimosas!) at Adega, in The 9, which was very good, and in the afternoon went on a nice walk to the lake and had takeout from Arrabiata’s for dinner. Here’s me and Joey enjoying the views on the roof of The 9 in our black and white stripes.

We’re also now three full weeks into our kitchen renovation and I think we can see the light at the end of the tunnel! (I know it’s progress report #4, but technically report #1 was at the beginning of week one — you know, to be confusing.) So what happened in week three?? FLOORS! That’s right, guys, we have a floor! Or part of a floor, at least.

In this picture you can see they also built the wall for the kitchen island. On the back side of this 7-foot wall will be our stove in the middle with a cabinet on each side, and all the electrical and gas lines will hide inside the wall. On the front side, facing the camera, will be our counter seating.

We chose “Silver Stone Grey Matt” ceramic tiles from The Tile Shop that are 18″x18″ squares. We liked the subtle grey-on-grey tones as a nice contrast to our high gloss white cabinets. The photo above is a pretty accurate representation of the tile color in real life.

There was a question of whether we should install our cabinets and then the floors, or the floors first before the cabinets. In our research we learned that putting the floors down under the cabinets is safest to prevent water damage from leaks, if there ever are any, because the tile will stop at least some of the water from getting through to the subfloor. In our case, though, that’s technically not much of an issue because our subfloor was redone for this project in a water-resistant material. On the other hand, doing the tile after the cabinets saves you the cost of tile. But we decided to do the tile first for one big reason: we might change our minds! If we ever want to rearrange any of our cabinets, especially the ones without countertops, we can if the floor is consistent throughout. Ok, it’s kind of silly, but we like to keep our options open! Plus, at this point we already bought and paid for the tile so we might as well just use it (and we got a great deal on it during a sale).

So, the tile is going in and we’re loving it. Which is good because there’s A LOT of it. Not only is our whole kitchen this tile, but also down the stairs and throug the hall to the front door AND the half-bathroom. So we better like it.

Up next: today we’re finally making a decision on countertops, and we should have finished floors and some cabinets going in by the end of the week!