Tile!

This part was easy (except writing the check at the end. And making 4 trips to Lowe's for tile, grout, and hardibacker. And loading and unloading the 70 tons of tile we'd bought. Yeah. Except for those things, it was easy.) It's nice paying someone else to do your work for you. I briefly toyed with taking on the tile myself, but the time, the need for expensive power tools, the wasted money if you screw up... just seemed like false economy, in the end. Also, it seemed like an insuperable pain in the fundament. We've served our DIY time with the paint and the bamboo, I think.

So we go these nice tiles--big ones in the kitchen and hall; little ones in the bathroom (they're porcelain, Mom & Dad, not ceramic. You convinced me.) The kitchen looks SO much more inhabitable now that that nasty old linoleum is no longer visible.
See how much prettier it looks? (Aunt Pauline, if you're reading this, you'll see I took your advice about newsprint in the windows. Only in this case it's tissue paper, as Ladonna had given us a stack for packing purposes. Might have looked a little more polished if I hadn't fastened them with painter's tape. Eh well.) Tomorrow we'll move the island back in, as well as the china cabinet and rocking chair. One step closer to being really, truly, properly moved in! With each step, the house looks better and more... I don't know... satisfying, pretty, pulled together, nice. Anyway, it's gratifying to see the thing I wanted emerge from the thing that was neglected and scuffed and unhappy looking.

Meanwhile, we're still sleeping on the sofabed in the living room.

And we're actually using that weird bathroom/laundry room/mudroom--we're waiting for the grout to set in the other bathrooms, and this is the only one that wasn't tiled. So I shouldn't have made fun of it for being a misbegotten freak of a room--it's actually coming in handy.

I'm sure you'll all feel sad for me when I tell you that this weekend I'll have to finally turn my attention back to... painting. We never finished the master bath, and I have to do the insides of the cabinets there and the insides of the hall closet before we can unpack the things that belong in them.

Ug.