Push pull click click.

That's what my dad used to say when he meant perfectly, without any hiccups or unexpected things. "If everything tomorrow goes push-pull-click-click..."

So we finally jumped sufficiently through the hoops, and were able to close on our refinance loan on Thursday night. Bathroom renovations, here we come! It's a relief to finally have the qualifying/waiting behind us. And the great thing is now we don't have a mortgage payment due until September, so the money we usually set aside for our big summertime family vacation, which we already spent on the kitchen renovations, now we can get out of our not-due-in-August mortgage payment! :)

I've spent most of this week, knowing we were getting close to closing and funding, looking for kitchen floor options. I've driven hither and yon looking at samples, I've been reading and researching on the internet. Vinyl, tile, and laminate were all contenders, and I was trying to take into account color (obviously), price, how waterproof it is, permanence, and the ease with which we can do it ourselves.

The kitchen facelift, as deliriously happy as I am with it, cost a lot more than we thought it would. Doesn't it always? We were hoping for hundreds of dollars, and it was thousands. So Blaine and I were sitting in our closet this morning (yes, our closet) and we were talking about priorities and how we're going to spend that money and will we have enough to do what we want? All of it? Emma's window? All three bathrooms? What I really want, as you know from my frequent whining, is a new kitchen floor. CARPET SUX. But given that our kitchen cost already way more than we intended to spend, and given that we have a finite amount forthcoming and I'm a huge dreamer, we were talking about if we should have spent those thousands on a floor? We can't get it back now of course, but maybe the floor is out, at least until we get the bathrooms done and see what's left over. Because the point of the refinance and the money is the bathrooms, whatever else I may want and dream about.

We'd just calculated our square footage last night, and determined that at $4/sq ft (which might be an unreasonably low estimate) it would be about $1200 in flooring. So Blaine dressed in his work clothes and got started on a list of chores, and I made breakfast for the kids and then got on ksl.com classifieds. One of the first ads I saw was for laminate flooring. Enough square footage for our needs, used but in great shape, for all of it they wanted $175. It was 120 miles away, but we stopped everything, hopped in the car, and drove there.

Long story short: I have my non-carpet kitchen floor. :) It is lighter than the color samples we were looking at, but it looks great with the paint, cabinets, and counters. It'll take this week probably to install it, but afterward no more carpet! And at a tiny fraction of the amount we thought we couldn't spend on it.

Another ad was for a screen door. Our back door has no screen and we want one. The one we found listed fits our door perfectly, and was $5, instead of the $300 the stores want new. So yay! We brought that home as well, and the glass and the screen are both in perfect shape.

I feel pretty good about today, pretty darn good. :)

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