Down to the Plywood!

Last night I figured I had a few hours so I would rip out the rest of the wood tiles. There were about eight rows of four tiles left, so I figured I could take out the tiles, place them in the newly empty garbage can and get something else done. Instead of getting down on my hands and knees, I realized I could use a shovel to catch under the tile and pry the whole thing up in one pretty easy motion. That worked pretty well until I started to get close to the front door. For whatever reason the tiles nearest the front and garage entrance doors seemed stuck to the sub-floor really well. I got out the pry bar and sledge hammer and got a tile up. Well, a tile and a LOT of the sub-floor. I could see the underlying plywood. It had a Grey color and splattered with drywall mud from when they first put it in years ago. Suddenly my 1 hour project had become complicated. Do I just clean up around where I had dug all the way through, or do I proceed to step two, taking out the sub-floor. At that point I was brimming with strength, had a helper and it was still light out. I got out the circular saw and set it to the right depth to cut through the remaining wood tiles and the sub-floor without going all the way down to the plywood. I put down a tarp between the entrance walkway and the rest of the living room, good thing because as soon as I hit those wood tiles with the saw there was smoke and dust filling the room. Apparently my saw blade was a bit dull, and when I would hit the metal staples holding the sub-floor to the plywood there would be a shower of sparks. I proceeded to saw out wood tiles and scrape up pieces of sub-floor. I started to have the sinking feeling that this was going to be a long night. When the sub-floor was installed it was lightly tacked down with nails, then stapled every where, I guess to reduce squeaking. When I would pry up a wood tile, it would leave behind the staples in the floor. My son and I finally got down a good technique that he would clean out the remaining wood from under the staple and I would pry it up with the pry bar. We vacuumed up and it looked pretty good.



Now I had another choice, do I call it quits for the night, or do I saw the rest of the sub-floor so we only have to clean up the living room once for this part? I decided to go for it and saw the 3/16" particle board in one foot by four foot strips. Once it was cut like this, it was a piece of cake to pry it up and not have it break in to little pieces. This made it easy to get the sub-floor up, but still left behind hundreds of 1 1/2" long 3/16" wide staples. Unfortunately my helper had to go to bed, so I kept on working in order to not leave an obstacle course for my family to have to navigate while I am at the day job. I quickly found out how much help my helper really was. The stubborn staples required at least a screwdriver and sometimes a pair of vice-grips to really get a good hold on the staple then pry it out with the pry bar. This process ground do a painful crawl as I had to pry up the staples, clear out the remaining wood junk and check for more staples. Of course I was clearing the staples IN to the area I was working on, so the pile got deeper and more difficult to find the staples. When I finally tried to stand up, I realized that sitting at a desk all day typing and moving a mouse around all day does not prepare you to crouch on your hands and knees for hours at a time. I was able to get all of the staples out of the floor and sweep up the floor before I went to bed. I did a final sweep AFTER I put away all the tools and found a few errant staples, so I'll have to get those tonight.

I am leaving the living room carpet in place for now until I can have some help moving furniture around in there to get up the carpet. I have a bad feeling that the pad of the carpet is held down with the same kind of staples. I am also pretty sure the kitchen has the same staples. So my next tool to buy is the right pry bar to get under the staples and take them out with a lot less effort. I think I spent more time pulling out staples than wood last night.



The next piece of the demolition to take on is actually sawing through the multiple layers of linoleum and wood sub-floor in the kitchen. My coworker suggested that I spend the bucks and get a five-pack of saw blades since the glue used to hold all that together will certainly gum up the blades and make them less efficient quickly. He also suggested that I get Carbide tipped blades so that when I do hit the staples it doesn't immediately dull the blade.

At this point I estimate the tear out is 1/8th done, so it's going to be a long haul one evening at a time, so I am planning on taking at least one day off next week to really get at it. I really need to figure out a way to not distribute the dust from this project throughout the house. I need to hang a tarp closing off the hallway and the living room. Set up the fan in a window in the kitchen to suck out the dust as soon as possible.

Well, back to my real job.

Later I added some photos in this post, and added a link to the web page album on the right.

John