As of the end of last week, the mud and drywall are nearly done! Looks like some sanding and painting and we are ready for cabinets!
The area feels like a real room again, especially now that the floor is down. We chose a linoleum sheet. Rock floors look nice but aren’t as comfortable to walk on and pose a lot of cleaning issues we don’t want. The laminates are beautiful but we didn’t want toxic formaldehyde out-gassing for us or our cats. Linoleum turned out to be extremely green, and looks great too! I only got to see the floor for a brief time before protective masonite was laid back down over it, but it looks as good as we’d hoped.
Below is a shot of the linoleum flooring. The patch (not yet glued down) won’t be seen because this whole area will be under a cabinet. The visible area will be one uninterrupted sheet.
An interesting thing we learned about linoleum is that no two sheets are exactly alike. It’s made on large rollers, sort of like taffy, and the pattern flows a bit differently every time. So you get the same general look for every roll but never see a repeating tiled pattern like you do on laminates.