Kitchen Floors and Stumpy

I've talked before about the never ending home improvement projects around our house, in particular the kitchen floor saga. To recap, two years ago (yes, TWO YEARS) Keith ripped up the ugly tract house linoleum floor along with repositioning the center island and building shelves and lots of other stuff, planning on installing a new floor. We bought wood at Home Depot for the floor, getting what we thought was a pretty good price, at around $350 for the whole floor. The boxes of wood have been sitting in the garage ever since, and in the meantime Keith has looked at tiling because he'd really like a tile floor in the kitchen instead of the wood floor THAT IS ALREADY BOUGHT AND PAID FOR.

Well, last week we were in Home Depot looking at nails or screws or something, I really don't remember because I try to block trips to Home Depot from my mind because they are agonizingly BORING. Keith can't just go in and buy a box of nails, he's got to inspect all the nails, compare prices, think about it for a while, and then an hour or two later maybe actually buy that box of nails. Or go home and think about them some more.

So, while he was in the hardware aisle (agony, sheer agony!) I wandered over to the flooring department just for something to do. And what do I find but some really nice ceramic tiling for 99c a 16" square, something like $15.00 a box, about $150 for an entire floor. I don't know much about ceramic tiling, but that price sounded really cheap to me so I had Keith come over and look at the tiles and he really liked the look and the price, too. So, this weekend he finally finished scraping what was left of the linoleum on the kitchen floor (again, TWO YEARS LATER!) and then went back to Home Depot to look at the tile again. I stayed home, needless to say. I told him that if he bought the tile he absolutely HAD TO PUT IT ON THE FLOOR NOW!

So, about two hours later he comes home tile-less. He did his research while standing in the aisle at Home Depot and realized that putting in a tile floor is a huge pain in the ass and unless we could afford to have a professional come and install the floor, which would probably cost about ten times the price of the tile, it was just too much work. We will stick with the original plan of putting the wood flooring down. Since it's already bought and paid for and all. But he's going to wait until spring so that he can open up the doors and windows because the glue will stink up the house so much. So, maybe, just maybe, we will have a floor sometime next year. But, I'm certainly not going to hold my breath.


This is our lovely floor that I've been staring at FOR TWO YEARS NOW. I won't know what to do with myself if we ever actually get that wood flooring in.

And, now for the Stumpy story.

We've got lots of stray cats in the neighborhood, like our little friend Mister that we feed and the three kittens that live under the car across the street that we also feed by default. They have learned to run across the street when Mister is eating and come over and eat along with him. He doesn't seem to mind much and is willing to share. Then there is this huge Siamese that we've seen around off and on.

Pretty kitty, but he lost his tail somehow and now has a gross bloody stump where his tail used to be. Be prepared, this next picture is gross, and I only got the back side of him as he was running off to hide from me.


It's disgusting! We're thinking that he either got grabbed by a big dog or got his tail caught somewhere and it got pulled off. Nasty. Gross. Ick.

Our cats are sitting in the window laughing at him.