I've done things like that before, but not on such a large scale. I feel bad for you. I assume they will use a demolition hammer. Please make sure they don't just put plastic on your cabinets. Everything should be wrapped with cardboard because the tile will fly! Plastic will not be thick enough. Ask me how I know!

I'm sorry to hear about all of that. The new combo looks good! I agree that the current tile and NVG don't go together, sometimes your lighting is enough to make something OFF.

If only we could live our lives backwards sometimes...

Sounds like you have a great attitude and perspective, though. It's going to look BEAUTIFUL!!!

don't beat yourself up... we all make mistakes. The good news is the new tile looks great with your granite. Good advice to cardboard up. You may also want to protect drawer glides where possible. Demo-ing tile is a HUGE mess (I know this from experience) The dust gets everywhere and can remain in the air for awhile.

So sorry!!! But you will get it right. Short term pain for long term gain (that's what I keep telling myself while in the midst of our renovation). But this is exactly why I ended up replacing our cabinets instead of trying to paint and salvage the perimeter. When it came down to it, I knew i would regret doing a half-way job. Good Luck!!!

I don't think it looks bad at all! Are you sure you want to change the floor? Why not put down a couple of colorful throw rugs or even a tan or brown to match the darker colors in your granite? You have light specks in your granite that match the floor. I'm not sure what color floor you're planning to put in, just remember that it too will look different in your house and could change the look of your granite. I'd give it some time before rushing into changing it.

I also think that the current floor looks fine with the granite. The darker colors in it are similar, but I guess you are focusing on the background being whiter rather than gold. Your cabinets may look better with the current floor. At this point, because the cabinets are in, you could go ahead and finish the kitchen and live with it for a while before deciding whether you still want to replace the cabinets.

When we bought our house, it had a tile floor in the kitchen which we had taken out to replace with wood. Demoing it didn't damage our cabinets. I don't think that its terribly unusual to replace the floor with cabinets in place. The flooring company at the time treated it as business as usual. That time, we did engineered wood which was floated over the smoothed out mortar base in the kitchen area.

When we remodeled our kitchen, 5 years ago, we kept the flooring. It had recently been refinished. We knew that we wanted to remodel the family room to take out the big rock hearth and we weren't ready to do it at the time. Because the existing fireplace and hearth cover about 4' by 10', it made more sense to replace the floor after we removed that.

We're just about to start the family room part of the project which will include replacing the floor in the kitchen, family room and breakfast room. This time we're doing hardwood so they will be doing a full demo of the floor in the kitchen area around the cabinets to replace it with a plywood subfloor so they can nail down the hardwood.

I agree with boymom and cloudswift -- it doesn't look that bad to me! Give it some time, live with it (in "real life", when you are not actually staring at the counter and floor surface at the same time) and then see if it doesn't grow on you. I think some area rugs could also tie it together for you. If, after giving it a chance, you are still ready to risk the demolition around the cabinets, then you will be able to do so knowing that it is truly "necessary" to do so.

I think the original tile looks fine, the new tile looks better, but extending that wood floor I see in the doorway would look awesome.

I also think the original is fine, but agree the new choice is nicer. I am sorry that this got messed up for you.

When stuff like this happens to us, and it does often, we say "who will really care in 10 years?" and go ahead and spend the extra money to do it right.

If we decide to live with whatever problem faces us instead of spending more money, we say "hey, we just saved ourselves $X amount of dollars!" and then go about trying to figure out what we can spend it on. LOL

Just sayin' :-)

Jodi-

I don't see a problem with the floor either. I think you're just so zeroed into it - that's what we tend to do - lol!

maybe wait and see how you feel about it in 6 months.

I surely wouldn't go off somewhere while workers were there doing something like that.

We are going to rip our tile and put in hardwood. We also struggled with keeping our existing floor and a few options that we considered were engineered hardwood floating floor over existing ceramic and new ceramic over existing ceramic. My brother recently had his ceramic floor removed with his cabinets in place and said it went fine - yes messy but doable.