Tiling Phase I: Removal

As soon as I stepped onto the crappy laminate floors in the living room, I knew I wanted to replace it. We really wanted wood but we knew there was no way in hell we were going to put up with all of the upkeep required to maintain nice wood floors. Clearly, if we're removing laminate we definitely don't want to put more laminate in. We have always liked the idea of stained concrete but decided it wouldn't really work with the style of house that we were looking for here, so tile was really our only option. There was tile already in the hallways, but it was your basic white foot-by-foot tile with sad gray grout that was about as dull as it gets. So, out it went!

This adorable guy would have destroyed wood floors in about a week, if I had to guess.

Boring! I won't pretend it was easy to get this stuff out, though.

So, we stopped at Lowe's to ogle all of the fun things we finally have a reason to buy and checked out the tile section while we were there. The very first thing we saw was some really pretty wood on display in the featured flooring section. "Next," we thought, but wait! It wasn't wood... it was tile! 

Photo from chron.com

At least the ugly floating laminate came out super easy.

Got it cleared out in under an hour!