The Ugly Tile has largely been banished to the hallways and interstitial areas of the house. We have painted, stained and finished 3 floors of the house, more or less. for some reason the 2nd floor is all hardwood, while the 1st and 3rd floors were only partially hardwood (4th floor was 100% Ugly Tile).

So here's what we've been fighting against:

This is the tile that covers more than 50% of our home. It's a mottled, beige-based affair which has been liberally splashed with that lovely orange paint that adorned every bit of molding in the house (still working to cover all that up).

• What's good about the tile: hides dirt
• What's bad about it: fugly

I guess it's pretty sturdy stuff (it's really heavy when you pile it up). But it looks bad, it makes everything around it look bad, too. The way we dealt with it varied from floor to floor. In the 1st floor kitchen we ripped up the tile and painted over the plywood (this was sort of the experimental stage, we'd proabbly shoulda left the tile and painted over it). On the 3rd floor we painted the tile, both in the main room and its adjoining hallway, effectivley covering every bit of tile on that floor. On the 4th floor, we ripped up tile and plywood, revealing the pine subfloor below, however we use top of the line tile floor mops to clean our floors. The subfloor was repaired and refinished. There's still tile in the upstairs kitchen, hallway and office, and in the hallway on the 1st floor. But at least it's in the minority now.

Here's some before and after photos of the progress:

BEFORE: This is before we bought the house, you can see not only the tile but also the Evil Orange everywhere.

Here's the primer (note the orange is also gone).

Floor painted.

AFTER: Floor with final finish. I used a satin tone this time, that glossy stuff is too much. Even this stuff looks al ittle too shiny to me. Do they make flat polyurethane?

BEFORE: To reiterate, here's the fireplace on the 3rd floor before we did anything. Why did they paint one panel and not the other?

AFTER: Ah, that's better!

I'll put together some more examples of the other work, if only to give me something to do around the office.

4th Floor Refinished, originally uploaded by Jimmy Legs.

The floors are pretty much done for now! What an exhausting procedure. Considering what we were up against, I think the floors came out well. We're still a couple of Louis Cattorze chairs away from getting added to the House Tour, but we're managing.

For some idea of what we went through between this photo and the one in the preceeding post, check Sylvia's Flickr site.

Oh, and for some reason the servers at work are blocking my ability to post on the comments page, so to electricgreek: yeah the floors are sealed, that's what the whole finishing process is, right? Is there some miracle product that wasn't mentioned in our how-to guides?

I'm taking the day off tomorrow! Actually, I'm taking every Friday in January off. My boss was kind enough to let me use my 2006 vacation days in 2007, they're not supposed to carry over. I gotta plan better this year to use these days. After 6 years of having no kind of time off whatsoever, it's been difficult adjusting to the idea that I can pick days on which I will be paid for not showing up, and not doing anything. Of course, this would be easier for me to grasp if they really left me alone on my days off. Invariably however, someone calls me and asks me to do something. That's one of the reasons I didn't mind working through the end of last month, most everybody else was out and I certainly wasn't gonna bug anybody.

Anyway, tomorrow's itinerary is pretty full: I'm getting an electrician over to do some work, I'm renting a cargo van, hitting the hardware stores for supplies, stopping by an acquaintance's house to pick up some salvaged wood flooring, then replacing planks and cutting filler slats to prepare the floor for the Big Kahuna on Saturday: the drum sander.

We're refinishing the subfloors on the top floor of the house, sanding, staining and sealing. Like the kitchen floor, this is a not-forever type of thing, it's just to make the place more livable for now. I'm not totally sure how it will come out, but it's way cheaper than putting in real hardwood floors for the time being. Worse comes to worst, we can always invest in a mess of throw rugs to cover up what we do this weekend. I'm picturing an entire floor covered in strung-together bathmats. Hmmm, that might not be a bad look.

Yep, it's becoming quite clear, I have terrible taste.