Monday, August 23, 2010

Farewell flooring!

So this past weekend Jim and I decided it was time to start our flooring demolition. He had to work on Saturday and I had other family things to attend to on Saturday morning, so we didn't really start rolling until about 2:00 on Saturday afternoon. I must say though, I'm pretty happy with what we accomplished in about a day and a half.

We are planning on putting down new hardwood floors in our front (formal) living room, hallway, closets and dining area. All of those areas had carpet down. So Jim started with the dining area, ripping up the carpet. Now, we could tell there were some other layers under there but yikes! Three layers of linoleum! The only before shot I have of the dining area is the first day we saw the house...

...so you see it had carpet in that area.

Under the carpet was the first layer of linoleum which is like what we have in our kitchen now, and what you can sort of see in the picture above.

Under that was this beautiful stuff...




Nice, huh? And then Jim had to go through and pull up TONS of staples from this layer.

Then under that layer was this...



...with even more staples to pull up.



In the meantime, while Jim was having a grand old time pulling up staples, I was hard at work tearing up the carpet/padding/tack strips in the hallway.


At first I thought I was going to have to go through and pull up each staple by hand. I'm pretty sure I'd still be pulling staples had I not thought about the scraper Jim bought to remove the linoleum. We ran that over the staples and most of them came out. I had to go through and remove some by hand, but some was better than all.

Then it was time to move on to the living room.

Here's a before shot...


And after everything was removed...


In the midst of our flooring party, I suggested to Jim that we might as well throw a layer of Kilz on the wall before the new flooring goes in. See, I realize it makes more sense to paint before the hardwood goes in but I have no idea what color I want and I want to see the room with the flooring in it before I make a paint decision. Slapping up a layer of primer was doable though.

So we decided to Kilz the room...


...and there's all our flooring, acclimating to room temperature :o)


So next was to tackle the closets. Remove the doors, tracks, stupid molding, carpet, no big deal right? Wrong. I pulled up the carpet in the closet only to find hardwood under it. What? Was there hardwood in the whole house at one point? Seriously, I don't know what the deal is.


And unfortunately I couldn't quite muster the strength yesterday to remove that hardwood so I just worked on removing the doors, tracks and molding and tried to be on clean-up duty since Jim was busy painting.

Oh and here's Pants helping...


So here's where we stand today. I'm not sure if Jim plans on tackling the linoleum or the hardwood in the closets when he gets home from work, but the other closet needs to be emptied as well.

Oh and I don't know if you can tell in the picture below, but if you can see that white patch where the dining area meets the hallway, yeah, that's a mortar ramp so that the original sub floor could meet up nicely with the 5 layers of flooring that were added in the dining area. Sweet!


3 comments:

Rachel L said...

the only three words that can be expressed...W. T. F. !!!

Andrea said...

how many layers of flooring can you actually put on top of each other?! That was crazy!

Jimmy Kimmel said...

that last layer looks scary. Remember they used to put aspestos in all kinds of products like floor tiles.