Onions Have Layers | and so does my kitchen floor

This is a tale of how my husband done lost his mind one day. He decided to rip out the kitchen floor.

Most recent floor. Lovingly remodeled by the dog.

We live in a pretty old house. It's a complicated tale, but basically it boils down to we aren't to the point where we can purchase a home. Still trying to get ahead and get those credit scores high enough to have a lender not laugh. So we are "renting to own" our current one. From my in-laws because they've be awesome enough to let us do this.

We've done a few repairs and things here and there. Mostly they always end up kicking us in the ass. Like when we removed the living room carpet to expose the original hardwood floors. Except the original floors had been ruined. We took up a small piece of carpeting near the front door first to assess the situation before taking it all up. The wood looked to be in decent shape. We were fooled.

On the left, kitchen. On the right, hallway with hardwoods (and a little glued down old padding).

Turns out that the original owners, or the people after them, had decided it would be a wonderful idea to glue down the carpet padding. We had carpet, then padding, then glued down ancient, black, dry rotted padding on top of what used to be glorious hard wood floor. It was a disaster. That we've been living with for a couple of years now because it's expensive to carpet a 20' x 16' room. Also the wood has seamless transitions from room to room so if we refinished the wood, we'd have to do three more rooms and a hallway.

Those seamless transitions fooled me again. I, wrongly it turns out, just assumed that those hardwood floors would continue on into the kitchen because that makes the most sense. We might have had a small incident where one of the dogs may have tried to eat the floor. We both hate the kitchen and bathroom and would love to gut and redo them both. However, we are po' folks so we live with it. But now the vinyl flooring is messed up. So we had a brief, very brief, discussion about what to do with the kitchen floor.

The second layer. Retro, vintage, funky.

Last week, after that very brief talk, he decided to just start ripping up floor. Y'all... it was insanity. I hadn't even researched replacement floor coverings! The kitchen floor was like an onion. It had layers. We had vinyl, then subflooring, then ancient, brown, dry rotted linoleum, then more subfloor. THEN WE HAVE UNFINISHED WOOD PLANK SUBFLOOR. They did not in fact continue that lovely hardwood into the kitchen.

The floor under the floor that was under the other floor. But not the hardwood we hoped for.

We did a little researching then headed to our local Lowe's. We ended up purchasing an inexpensive laminate. It was only $0.68 cents per square foot, about $17 per box. Of course, the kind we really wanted was closer to $4 per square foot, but that was just too expensive. After figuring our square footage, we got seven boxes. Turned out we only needed five so we took two back. I'll take my money back, thank you very much.

I am actually pleased with the results. I mean... it was $0.68 a square foot so I wasn't expecting it to be perfect. It is definitely worlds better than the vinyl that was previously there. I'm calling it a win.

Problem is that now I hate the way the cabinets look. Their color, the pulls and knobs, the countertops, the actual cabinets. Our new floor has started a snowball effect of probable DIY fails, but maybe, just maybe, another win or two.