[Sylvanfan]

Well since Alberta winters are so crappy, it usually does give you a good excuse to try and do a few things to your house. After all it's not Ontario and we can't sit on our decks in a speedo till 2 in the morning year round like Cheese does.

I actually plan on selling my place in the spring to move back to B.C. but decided to spend a few dollars to spruce the place up. My plan is to redo the flooring on the lower level of my two story house and just upgrade the finishing downstairs. House is 5 years old and the finish materials were your standard builder cheap stuff. The vinyl was pretty much worn thru and the carpets are in pretty bad shape. The walls also needed a new coat of paint, and I think the previous owners did it themselves because they didn't paint behind the fridge, stove,washer, dryer, in the pantry and in a few other areas where you wouldn't notice. Also you can tell that the baseboard was on prior to the painting as the baseboard is half wall color and half white. All in all my plan was to spend about $5000 to redo the living room, kitchen, and all three bathrooms with tile, harwood, and a better looking baseboard, and paint the walls.

I finally finished getting all the tile done on the downstairs level and that was no easy task. With the way my house lays out there are a lot of 45 degree skews and with the way walls are located, and an angled island in the kitchen I ended up having to cut like 40% of the tile. But now that it's down I must admit that it looks 100 times better than the cheap vinyl that was down before. Next up will be to get all the grouting done, and than it will be time to put down the wood floor. Thus far I've spend about $3800 to buy the wood, all the tile, as well as a wet tile saw, and a few other things you need to lay tile. I still need to buy a couple things for the wood floor and will need to rent a specialty nailer. Overall though looks like I should come close to my budget, and my tile estimates look to be dead on. So far I think it looks pretty good and I'll try to post some pics.

Pretty satisfying feeling though when it all comes together. It is a fair amount of work but it's well worth it I think. I'm fortunate that my dad was pretty handy and that my wife's dad was a finish carpenter so we can always ask him how we should do things. My wife is also really helpfull for this type of thing too.