Complete Tile Shock

This will shock everyone. We have the tile all laid in the living room and dining room. Yes, you read that correctly. That's Mi Miguel putting in the last and final tile. It was a lot of work and I wouldn't recommend that anyone tackle that project if you're a tiling novice. 

This is the view from the middle of the dining room and living room. This evening we'll be grouting. Come tomorrow I'll thoroughly clean the entire 500 and some odd square feet of it.

I removed the door and shelving from the coat closet. Living in Florida, I don't really see the purpose of having a space reserved for coats. Mi Miguel laid the same tile in the closet but staggered it rather than do the herring bone pattern. Much easier but you can see that the herring bone does so much more for the tile. A fresh coat of paint, a transitioning threshold and the closet will be transformed into a game nook with a shoe tray and a few hooks for lightweight jackets. 

After grouting, Mi Miguel gets to take a break for several days. He certainly deserves it. I'm going to busy myself with painting baseboards and doing the touch up on the walls. After that, we can set up the rooms and finally put this favorite flea market find of mine in the dining room corner. 

Once we get the two rooms set up, we're going to stop working on the inside and proceed to the outside. The weather is too beautiful to be cooped up in the house. Plus, Mi Miguel will never get me outside to help him build, paint and landscape in the heat come summertime. I really want a relaxing backyard like this one.

Through advice from friends and neighbors that have been through what we're going through, we know that we do need to take a break once in a while and go have fun. Yesterday we took the morning off to go to our letter I restaurant. The photo above shows the entry doors to the restaurant. You can read about this on my Facebook Group: Florida Restaurants A-Z

Since we were in the area we drove to the resort hotel where we stayed over the Christmas holiday last year. It was then as tourists that we decided to become residents. We planned to buy a beautiful home on acreage. Little did we know that we would end up falling in love with a fixer upper on a sweet little canal.

Walking around the hotel lobby and the beach, I asked Mi Miguel if he thought it would be romantic to stay in the hotel this Christmas where it all started last Christmas. He immediately booked us a room with an ocean view.