First walking into this
house and seeing original hardwood floors in great condition was a bonus check
just waiting at our door! Then I ran into the linoleum floor in the kitchen. I was hoping and anxiously waiting for this day to come. After tearing out the
kitchen cabinets, I could only see a gray felt, with some wood peeking through.
Could it be true? Hardwood floors underneath?
What was discovered… Three
Floors. Really? Base floor - original pine floor, the same
floors that are throughout the bedrooms and hallway. Some sort of glued down
felt is on top of that, next plywood sub floor, then original checkered pattern
VCT tile, and another sub floor, and last but not least glued linoleum. This is a man’s job to take up! Even trying with
a big crowbar the floors weren’t moving or maybe I just need to get stronger.
After tearing up all three layers and removing 5,000 + staples, it was time to
tackle this felt. After 4 hours of
scraping and going through multiple bottles of solution, it didn’t seem like we
made any progress on removing the felt.
So time to speak to the expert flooring
guy.. He discovered he would be able to get
the felt up, but the hard wood floor underneath would be in really bad shape.
When the sub floor was put down, they cut it on top of the wood floors making
extremely large cuts. NOOOOO!!!! Sigh. I really wanted to try to save this beautiful wood floor. I like the look and
feel of using old & new in a space, catches the eye and makes people talk.
With new cabinetry and new walls, the cut up floors would have been out of
place. They were so bad that the flooring guy even said people would walk into
the space and wonder what had happened to the floors. So, the money we were
going to spend on restoring the wooden kitchen floor will now go towards new
tile.
Next up is adding character to the house.. my favorite! :)
