Tearing Up The Floor

What would you do the day after your big work Christmas party, and the day before you have contractors coming in? Why tear up the floor, of course!! (This post does not refer to dancing.)

In order to prepare for our Greensaver retrofit, we had to "lift" the floor in the kitchen. The finished floor is a floating uniclick tile, which we could easily remove & later replace, but then we had to cut out the plywood subfloor. I pulled out the giant Black & Decker How To book that I borrowed from the library and got some tips on how to proceed. We unplugged the stove and moved it to the back room. We lifted the tiles, carefully numbering them all on the back, and indicating their orientation. We stored them in the upstairs bathroom, one of the only spaces that Green$aver would not have to work in. We rolled up the thin foam underlay and set it aside. Then we pulled out the circular saw that Dan gave me for my birthday. (I love practical gifts!!) We set the saw blade to the depth of the subflooring levels (5/8" plywood + 1/4" poplar underlay + 1/8" old linoleum). Crowbar, hammer and lots of elbow grease, and we pulled out the first piece. We realized that the linoleum was glued to the poplar, which was staped to the plywood, which was screwed and NAILED into the joists. We decided to take the linoleum/poplar layer off first, and then just remove the parts of the plywood where they would need access in order to insullate the crawl space below.

We also removed the base cabinets, except for the two end ones, because they have plumbing running through them. Demolition can be fun. You get to bang and tear stuff out. But it was a hard day of heavy labour, and I know that it is going to be followed by many weeks of more complicated work just to bring it back to where we were. I am having major regrets. We could have gone to Paris for two weeks, but instead we are renovating our kitchen. Will it be worth it? One of my colleagues says that a kitchen that bugs you is like a bad relationship - it will keep bugging you until you deal with it. So, this is me - dealing with it. Hopefully writing will set me free.