So excited to finally be done with my dining room renovation! There were definitely bumps along the way, but I’m so happy with the results.😍 I have to admit that I was worried about the herringbone pattern being too busy with the brick floors in the main hallway, but in the end, I decided to give it a try. Here’s a look at the before:

The wood floors were beautiful, but in really bad shape. With two boys and a dog, I chose tile to replace the wood thinking that a herringbone pattern would give it a bit more modern feel. I tried out a few different grout colors to find the right one for my tile. Matching the white of the tile is really important because if the white grout is brighter than the tile, it can make the floor look dirty. I chose platinum grout because it is light in color and I knew it would not show every speck of dirt.

After I had picked the perfect grout, tragedy struck! The grout dried too quickly and cemented to my floor! 😭🤬 Actual tears were shed! We tried haze remover and about 1,000 other things, but NOTHING was happening. We eventually resorted to pressure washing inside the house, in my dining room, and risked ruining my beautiful wallpaper. That’s how desperate we were.

We were so pleasantly surprised that it actually WORKED, albeit slowly.  We decided to increase our efforts and try to make it go faster, so it was either jackhammer the whole floor, or use this wire attachment,  to scrape the grout off.  The wire attachment won.

Two short months later, we are FINALLY done! We still have one more room left to tile, and we will absolutely not make the same mistake again!😂 Here are a few more pictures of my completed dining room: Be sure to check out our other projects on the blog.