Kitchen Floor Part One

We have craziness going on over here!

Have you ever planned a party or were expecting company and felt the need to do a few things around the house before guests arrived? We do that. We will make a list of things we would like to have happen before "X" date.

And that is what happened here - We were expecting our terrific friends from half way across the country to come for a short visit in a few weeks and decided we would like to get the kitchen floor done. Nothing like a deadline to motivate!

(Sadly our friends had to change their plans, but we had already started by the time we got the bad news. I tried to entice them with a private kitchen floor reveal, but they had to decline. Rats.)

So, while I was out of town visiting another terrific friend, Hero and company (Brenden, Colin and Liam) got out power tools, crow bars, pliers, face masks, the shop vac and other assorted tools of destruction to tackle the kitchen floor.

A note here - Liam has been baffled by our desire to re-do this floor. He thought the one we had was just great. That kid. But he still got in on the demolition.

They started by covering the cupboards and the rest of the house to keep the dust contained. 

First step - Cut through several layers of old floor. Note the vacuum - Good idea.

First peek underneath what we have been walking on for the last year.

(Actually, we saw this before when we started the kitchen project. Now we are seeing lots more of it.)

Hero got a great new floor scraping tool to help with this project. I totally understand any excuse to get a new tool.

Everyone wants a turn with it. The thing with Hero is that he makes everything look so easy and fun. We usually find out it is not fun or easy. Good thing things are fun and easy for him!

Where is this kid's parent? Really? No shoes? Guess they were just too excited to get started to notice he was walking around the nail, splinter and staple infested kitchen.

Good thing his tetanus booster is up to date.

One not so attractive floor yields to an even less attractive floor.

The top two layers are backed with a wooden subfloor, which totally bumped this floor up about 27 inches.

 We felt really tall in our kitchen.

And the bottom layer of floor. The photos really don't do it justice. Trust me when I tell you this is not pretty. It has kind of an avocado green tint to it. But under some trim where the floor was perfectly preserved, it was mostly gray and white - much cleaner and brighter.

We decided to leave this layer as we were not sure what the material was and didn't want to chance stirring up any toxic dust.

(This is a better shot of the color.)

Because we were working with the remains of two floors, we counted approximately 25,694 staples removed.

Colin did get some shoes on by this point. Would not want one of these bad boys in the foot.

A fraction of what we excavated.

Liam ran the metal yardstick across the floor to find any staples we may have missed. You would think with four people scouting for them, we would have been good. Not so much. We found a handful more. They were impossible to see on the camouflage floor. 

source

We were totally inspired for this project by this terrific looking floor. 

This is not fancy, expensive hard wood flooring. It's not even aged, rescued barn wood planks.

It is, in fact, plywood. Really.

We read lots of tutorials and comments on how it holds ups. We were impressed.

So we priced it out. Coming in at about $250 for the whole thing, we totally went for it.

We had 4'x8' sheets cut into 6" strips the long way at Lowes'. So great! Saved us a ton of work and they did a terrific job. Hero cut them into different lengths so they would be staggered and look more 

farm house-y/cottage-y.

At this point we lost some of our manual labor (we were not complaining - they worked hard), so Brenden and I laid out the boards while Hero followed behind us with the nail gun. We stayed up way too late to get most of it installed that day. 

See what I mean about crazy!