New Floor

I'm back in Chicago, and Dad has been visiting here the last week. Our major project has been to re-do the floor in the pantry. The previous owners of the condo had done a beautiful job doing the bathroom and the kitchen, but the pantry remained undone. When we were preparing the floor, we found two things: under the linoleum, a penny from 1953 and a scrap of newspapers from 1925. The 1925 paper probably dates the layer of tarpaper, directly above the wooden flooring; the penny probably dates the linoleum. At any rate, here is how it used to look:

Since we didn't want to pull up the old linoleum, but needed to even out the floor, we put down a layer of cementboard. The old baseboards seemed moldy, so we pulled those off as well:

On top of this layer, we put down the tile. When we went to the store to get new tiles, we didn't find a sufficient number of the red ones that we liked, so we put some white ones in the middle. I'm glad it worked out that way, since I think this looks even better that it would have with all of the light-red tiles. After putting down the cement mastic, we added the grout and the new and newly-stained baseboards. Now it looks like a real pantry! Thanks for all the help, Dad.