When we bought our house the floors were not really a selling point. The main living space has laminate, which luckily is not super ugly laminate. The bedrooms have carpet, which I HATE. I am not on the carpet train. Sure your feet have something warm and fluffy to walk on, but its typically ugly and just waiting to be stained.

We planned to eventually replace the carpet, but our plans got moved from the future to the present after the introduction of a new kitten.

She make look cute, but she is a little monster and decided she didn’t like the carpet one bit. I’ll spare you the gross details, but our bedroom carpet had to be removed immediately.

We considered hard wood for about 3 seconds, but with four cats, tile is a way better option. Tile is wayyyy more durable than hardwood. You can spill liquids and don’t have to worry as much about scratches. With the wood look tile we could get the best of both worlds.

I didn’t want to spend more than $2 a sq foot, so we headed to Floor and Decor to see what options they had. Floor and Decor has some pretty good options, but there are ENDLESS wood tile options at other retailers as well. You can end up spending a lot of money getting really quality wood look tile.

I knew I wanted something not too dark and something with a lot of pattern variation. I bought samples of these three to see how the looked in my home.

The one on the left was the most expensive at $2.29 a sq foot, but it had the most pattern variation and grey undertones. Even though it was over our budget,  we decided to “splurge” since it would only end up being about $200 extra in total to go with this one and we liked it so much more than the others.

We got a few quotes on getting the tile professionally installed, but tile laying is expensive. It would have doubled the cost of the project to get it professionally done. My Dad has some previous tile experience, so we decided to do it ourselves.

Up next: Carpet Removal!