Our whole house was hardwood when we bought it, except the kitchen and bathroom. The bathroom is a story for another day, but the kitchen was a large clay colored tile. When we took the wall down in the kitchen along with a wall of cabinets, we not only noticed the floor in the kitchen was 4 inches higher than the rest of the house, but we exposed sub floor boards that were under the wall and not tile or hardwood. This left us with a nasty, uneven, nail-y crack from the kitchen to the living room, where we desired an 'open' feel. It was our plan all along to put hardwood floors in the kitchen, but we went about as long as we could without me losing my mind before we actually did it!
So 2 days before Christmas Eve (Monday) we went and picked up hardwoods and listened to the clerk's comments like 'You're not actually going to start this project 2 days before Christmas are you'? Which of course we responded 'YES!' and carried on in our over enthusiastic for a project way. Monday morning after our 7:30am gym ritual we headed home, ate some eggs, and took a sledge hammer a the floor! We knew Monday that we would both have 2 weeks work - free, along with lots of family in town for Christmas if we got ourselves in a pickle! So we figured, what better time to tear our house up and have it not disturb our lives? So, we started taking the tile up. OMG it's a click in tile! This is the easiest stuff to take out ever - we thought. No need for a sledge hammer! Just chisel through the grout and lift the tile right up! Super easy. Stack it.. and done with the first layer! It took about 20 minutes. Wow! This is the best project we've ever done! Maybe God's going to give us a break and make this one easy! These were the thoughts I was having at the time. There's something about having your kitchen is disarray that really makes you feel lost, uneasy, irritable, and unsure what the future holds. Call me crazy but every time we take something apart I feel like my life is being uprooted. HA.
So, the floor gods decided they didn't want to cooperate with this 'easy' project we had in mind, and under the tile we found a nice layer of blue and white linoleum. Great, we'll just get rid of that. But under that was a turquoise layer of linoleum. UGGGHHHH I thought. This is disgusting!! Both layers of linoleum were soaked in dog urine, which had its own smell of NASTY! I opened all the doors and windows (luckily it was one of those 60 - in - December kind of days) in hopes of getting the raunchy smell OUT of our house!! Talk about old house smell. Here are some pics of the tear up process - keep in mind these pictures were taken on my i-phone, some deep into the night.
Yep! It smelled as awful as it looked. My husband always gets the worst of the jobs when we work. :( While I took stuff to the dump and cleaned as we went, he was laying all of this nasty stuff trying to saws-all the boards up and make them look good around the cabinets. It was pretty yucky - but still not the worst project we've done. Once we got down to the sub floors it looked like this - and we kind of wanted to leave it like this.
Oh - but one little problem. When we started taking boards out around the sink we noticed things were damp (palm to face). Although Steven wasn't into it at the time.. I insisted we take all the boards out of the bottom of the sink and see how much was wet. As he watched me rip rotten boards apart I think he started to see the necessity behind the matter! There wasn't much mold, but most of the wood was rotten and soggy. We had a garbage disposal leak and a dishwasher overflow in the Fall.. 2 things that are enough to ruin a kitchen!! We ended up having to take the entire cabinet around the dishwasher to the dump, and we took all the boards out of the sink base cabinet out - leaving only what was dry and exposed. We ended up being lucky! It could have been so much worse. The subfloors were still intact and just a little damp - so we washed them and put a fan on them until they dried. Here is the cabinet completely disassembled, and then a picture of the end of the day when Steven had rebuilt the base of the cabinet.
Not quite the project we planned on doing during floor laying day - but completely necessary. Not to mention the kitchen smells better than it ever has! Getting all the layers of floor out, and the rotten boards under the sink replaced has created a much fresher smell! :)
By the time we finished all of this it was about 7PM - time for me to shower and get to our annual Girls Secret Santa Party! I told Steven to wait for me, but of course he was eager to get started laying down the boards! Our goal was to finish the floors TODAY, and there wasn't much that was going to stop us! A couple hours later around 9PM I got home and he had probably 5-6 rows of boards in! We went with a gunstock oak, that was a little bit darker and a 3 1/4" board rather than what we have in the rest of the house which is 2 1/4". Because our floors are 50 years old, fairly damaged and sun stained we knew we couldn't match them. Our goal was to get as close as we could, then go a little darker and do something different (like width) to make them look different, rather than an off match. I'm not really sure if it worked. I don't know what people think when they first see them! Ha. Anyways, here is a picture of the moisture barrier under the wood, and then some of the early boards.
We ended up having to take a row of damaged boards out of that were already in. Can you imagine how hard taking up 50 year old hardwood floors is?! It was nearly impossible to take a row out without damaging the row behind it. With lots of chiseling, sawing and patience we got it! We made it to our goal at 2:30am that night. Finish the kitchen, leaving only the little hallway in the back for Steven and our cousin-in-law Blake to finish up the little hallway in the back on Christmas Eve!
Thanks to those hardworking boys it was finished and cleaned up by the time we were ready for our Christmas Eve Party!! Here are some pictures of the completed project (ignore the overexposure):
We still need to get trim up, wrap the beam, reinstall and build around the dishwasher, and build around the fridge. One frustrating hiccup was that the fridge won't fit in the wall we were hoping to put it in, so the conclusion is we will leave it where it is and make it look 'built in'.
We got new pendant lighting up over the kitchen sink, and build a window sill to finish off the bottom trim of the window. It used to connect to the tile countertop so it had no bottom trim piece.
Here is the seam between the old and new floors. I think it turned out close to the best it could for trying to transition from old floors!!
Sorry this was such a lengthy post, but it was a lengthy project!!
Hope you are all having a great Monday back after the holidays!
Xoxo
B
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