Kitchen Catastrophe

We were ready for our kitchen to be installed - the floor was done, the appliances were delivered, everything we needed to do was ready, and we were excited. I was out to dinner on Wednesday night when Andrew sent me a text, "I think something is wrong with the floor, we should think about delaying the kitchen installation." Our grout had started to crumble so Andrew lifted a tile and discovered that the SimpleSet mortar had never dried. Mortar is supposed to take 24 hours to dry and, since the floor was installed on Saturday, it was way overdue to not be dry by Wednesday.

Completely wet mortar

Andrew looked up reviews of the product and found that others had also experienced the same issue, the product is faulty. Who knew we had to read the reviews before buying the only premixed mortar available at Home Depot!? Long story short, we decided to delay the install of the kitchen. I got home Thursday night and, after taking one look at the floor, knew we needed to rip up the floors.

The beginning of the demolition

We had a huge task ahead of us, pulling up every tile, scraping the mortar off the floor as well as the tiles, all so we could save the cement board and tiles. Thankfully, our siblings volunteered to help, saving Andrew and I from a full night of work. We worked upstairs while they scraped the tiles clean in the basement.

It was heartbreaking to have to rip up our floors and delay the installation, but we knew it was the best decision to make sure we didn't have any future problems. Thanks to the sibling help, we were able to finish the entire demolition in a few hours.

Late night demolition complete

Since the kitchen was no longer happening on Friday, we decided to head to my parent's house for my mom's birthday dinner. We were sad about our kitchen but it was really nice to be with my family and make Mirky happy on her birthday.

birfday girl

This weekend was my longest run on my marathon training, so I was happy to be in Kutztown to run with my Aunt and Uncle. I started using Nike Running+ to track my pace and distance, which has been really helpful. After running, I spent some time in my parent's gardens with Lizzie.

Lizzie girl

It was nice to get away from our catastrophic house for the night but we had to rush back to Philly for our old landlord's wedding at Terrain, Anthropologie's garden store. I have always loved going to Terrain and the bride has amazing taste, so I was so excited for this wedding. 

It was a beautiful night and we were so happy to have been part of it, but we knew it was an early morning to redo the floors. We skipped the after party and headed home to get a good night of sleep.

After a Sunday morning trip to Home Depot, the amount of work we had to do hit me...hard. I haven't cried much during these house projects, but the amount of work we had ahead of us was overwhelming and I needed to get the crying out of my system. This time the floors would be even more difficult because we had to mix the 6 bags of Porcelain Tile dry mortar (half the price at $21/bag) ourselves. 

Mixing the mortar took about 10 minutes and then it needed another 5-10 minutes to dry, so our first row of tiles took over an hour to lay. At this pace, we would have been done around 10pm. Thankfully, Dan offered to help so we had him mix the mortar while Andrew and I laid the tiles.

Andrew teaching Dan the tricks of mortar mixing

The cats were very involved

It was a long long day but Dan helping really sped things up. We were able to lay down the rest of the tiles in another 5 hours, ending around 6pm. On the very last tile, Merrill decided to run through the mortar and across the tiles, leaving paw prints across the kitchen. It was an easy clean up, but leave it to Merrill to do something like this after a long day. 

Hopefully, the tiles will set this week and we will be ready for our kitchen installation on Friday. If not, I give up and we are leaving the kitchen empty and making it a cat playground :)

P.S. I am trying out a new blog feed, BlogLovin. Testing this link to "claim" my blog!