I spent a long time looking through our photos from the renovation process to find these images to share. For some reason I cannot for the life of me put my hands on a group of photos that I KNOW I took. I think there must be one memory card floating around in this house somewhere that will turn up some day, right? It has to. Anyway, here is the reveal of our polished terrazzo. I’ll just show you the photos right now and provide the commentary at the end. 🙂

To recap, we had badly damaged terrazzo floors that may or may not have been better off covered and now we have smooth, polished and gleaming terrazzo floors that turned out looking beautiful, all things considered. So what do you think our reaction was when we saw the final results? We hated it. Not trying to create drama here, but we were actually extremely disappointed when we FIRST saw the floors. Somehow our understanding of reality and our actual expectations had not lined up. What we knew was that our floors were in bad shape and what we expected was to have floors that showed no trace of any stains and looked like basically brand new terrazzo. I’m not kidding; I had it in my mind that the stains would be gone and that our light/white terrazzo was going to be perfectly light/white everywhere. Instead, when we walked in and saw that there were many areas that were still badly discolored we experienced a range of emotions from anger to confusion to disappointment to disbelief that “we spent HOW much for this???”. I think I had spent so much time looking for photos of the kind of terrazzo that I wanted that I forgot what kind of terrazzo I actually had. Talk about buyer’s remorse! We ended up spending a lot of money on the job and we realized that by the time it was all said and done, we wouldn’t have spent that much more to get what we really wanted which was hardwood. Doh! There were other issues with the floors that we had to have the company come out and assess and though I personally don’t think that we got exactly what we paid for, I understand that it was a difficult job. Just being honest here.

Let’s fast forward 9 months to today. What do we think about the floors now? Well, we have gone back and forth on that constantly over these many months. We grew to appreciate the floors and even like/sorta-love them and then we’d experience one of the drawbacks to terrazzo and we’d be back to regretting them and the money we’d spent, etc. In fact, I think the money factor is what was the biggest burn, overall. It’s not that we couldn’t live with what we had, it’s that we spent so much to get it when we could’ve gotten something we liked even more. Multiple thousands of dollars is not something we generally trifle with, so I think we were every so slightly justified in being tizzied up about the whole thing. The question was, could we get over it, move past it, stop complaining about it and be content? Of COURSE we could. And we did. And you know what the funny thing is? In taking the time to collect the photos and write the content for these posts, I’ve been finding myself truly admiring our floors and feeling grateful that we went through this whole ordeal, if for no other reason than that it has helped us to keep our perspective on what is truly important. When you are involved in a home renovation project, you will undoubtedly make mistakes and find yourself questioning your decisions after the fact. I can’t imagine this not happening because for one, hindsight is always 20/20. And secondly, I think we are sometimes purposefully led to make decisions that seem like “mistakes” so that we can have an opportunity to respond in a way that reflects our trust in God and our gratefulness to him (or lack thereof). So what if our terrazzo floors aren’t perfect? So what if we spent more money than we coulda/shoulda/woulda? We’re just so grateful we’ve been able to have a home to renovate and grateful that we’ve had many things go RIGHT. Sometime soon, you’ll find out how the terrazzo floors played a HUGE role in pointing us toward the direction for our kitchen design and let me just tell you, we flippin’ LOVE our kitchen.

Next time, I am going to share a more informative post about what we’ve learned from living on terrazzo floors for the past 9 months. We lived with hardwood floors for 7 years (and I grew up with them) so it has been a learning curve for sure.

Tell me, have you experienced any gut-wrenching home renovation “mistakes” that you later learned to love and appreciate?