I no longer hate my kitchen!

The past six months we have been giving our kitchen and dining room a bit of a makeover. In December we painted the walls yellow. In January, we painted the cupboards white (which we then ruined by using polyurethane - we will be redoing them soon!). And in April, we tackled the floors.

This, folks, is what our dining room floor looked like. See that beautiful carpet? Yep, carpet in the dining room. The previous owner used this area as a family room so carpet made sense. We needed a bigger space for our dining table and we already have a front room and a downstairs family room.

Well, three kids later and it's hashed.

So we took out the carpet and the border of tile around the dining area. We also took out the carpet in the high-traffic area - the hallway and walk areas in the kitchen, leading to the bedrooms and garage.

This is a funny story: We had to take the vents off the floor to take the carpet off. Well, Tippy, our cat, got curious. About an hour later we heard meowing and couldn't figure out where it was coming from. We looked over and saw fur poking out of this vent - one we had not opened - and sure enough! She had made her way through the vents to this spot!

We replaced the carpet with this pretty cherry wood-looking laminate. We went with laminate because it fit our budget and was relatively easy to install.

The kids had fun helping out.

It wasn't a hard task but it was tedious. And it took for-ev-er! We did it during Spring Break and it took us the entire week. Thank goodness for friends and moms for helping keep the kids entertained!

Once the majority of the floor was in, the kids had a lot of fun playing on it! They made a bed from the couch cushions and danced and played cars on it.

We left the tile in the main part of the kitchen - less cost and less work. But the molding between the different floors was a challenge. Lucy's been a photo bomber lately. :)

Once they were done, we celebrated by bringing the train set upstairs.

Spencer set up a pretty elaborate track, winding below the table.

The kids had a lot of fun, and we are loving our new floors!