What Lies Beneath

Today a good friend came over in the afternoon and spent five hours working with me on the floor in the kitchen. We made a point of moving all of the furniture and appliances off of the remaining flooring. The flooring under the stove was in relatively good shape, and we could see the original white flooring with black pattern. The flooring under the refrigerator had a little water damage, but not that bad. The flooring under the dishwasher was completely ruined by water damage. It didn't seem wet at that time, but had obviously been exposed to some serious water over time. The particle board didn't come up in big pieces like it had in other places, it came up in little one inch pieces, the spacing between the staples. We discovered that the cabinets were obviously put in after the particle board, but since it was ruined in the dishwasher cavity we had to remove some under the edge of the cabinet. My son found a good long piece from another area in the floor and we put it under that spot so that the edge of the cabinet wouldn't be completely free floating. If you look closely you can see the white board to the right of the dishwasher in this picture.



After getting all of the flooring up from under the fridge, stove and dishwasher, we broke out the saw to begin taking out the final segments of the floor. I had hoped to use one of the "demo" blades that my contractor friend had given me. However I found out that professional saws have a different hole pattern in the middle than common man saws like mine. Fortunately I hadn't taken back the $5.00 saw blade I had left, so I put it on. The saw worked pretty well until I had cut about thirty feet of flooring. I think I caught a particularly bad stretch of nails and literally broke off all but one of the carbide tips from the saw blade. I had to go back to an old saw blade to complete the saw work, while it wasn't as effective as a new blade I was able to finish the sawing today.




While I had hoped to be completely done with the floor today, the last thing we were able to do before Dinner was to remove two of the four sides worth of coving around the butcher block island. To my chagrin, I discovered that the island is actually sitting on top the second layer of linoleum.



Yes, the attractive brick level :) So, it's not as clear cut to remove this flooring as I had to break through the particle board right at the edge, or just inside of, the island.

Tomorrow should be the last day of flooring removal in the kitchen. We'll see if that true :)