Friday December 16, 2005
First I take the doors off the small kitchen cabinets. I tried unscrewing them, but that didn’t work. It was easier to pull them off with the crowbar. With the cabinet doors off, I was able to assess the contents, pack away what we wanted but rarely used, and throw out the rest.
Saturday December 17, 2005
Remove the peninsula. I begin with the cabinet doors and then am able to get off most of the other wood. The tile counters are a challenge because they are set into two inches of concrete.
Friday December 30, 2005
Remove the shelves of the L-cabinet. It’s a good thing that AJM wasn’t here to see me, because I had to use the circular saw to cut through them.
Saturday December 31, 2005
We bought more Metro shelving from the Container Store and some Elfa drawers. We put the Metro shelving on wheels so that we can put the appliances and dishes we need and wheel the out of the way while we’re working on different parts of the project.
Note: 2008-01-22. This was one of the smartest things we did during the entire project.
Monday January 2, 2006
AJM got into the swing of things and began ripping up the flooring. Before I bought this house in 1993, we had vinyl tiles installed over the old linoleum. I was surprised when the tilers didn’t take up the old floor, but they assured me that it wasn’t worth the effort and that it provided a flat surface for laying new tile.
The linoleum had been laid over 1/4 inch fiberboard and that laid on top of the pine subfloor. That’s the layer that we wanted to strip down to.
In the 1940s, when this house was built, they used pine planking rather than plywood sheathing for the subfloor. I confirmed, what I’ve long suspected, that the wood floors in the rest of the house are indeed this original subfloor.
I put the new shelf onto the tall Metro unit and rearranged everything, after taking everything down, tearing up the floor, and then moving the unit back. I do appreciate our new unit on wheels!
Monday January 9, 2006
I remove the last of the vinyl and linoleum flooring. I also pry off a chunk of the base cabinet that forms the L.
The subfloor in our 40’s house is laid diagonally. It’s pine but it is fairly rough and there are fairly large gaps between the boards. The kitchen had plywood over the subfloor and lineoleum and then another thin layer of plywood and linoleum tiles.
In the breakfast room addition there was oak over the subfloor but the subfloor was deteriorating. I ripped it all out and for awhile we were looking at bare dirt between the 2×6’s. We had to step across them to get to the back door. I built it back up with plywood to the same height as the kitchen and then we had vinyl put down in both rooms.
Perhaps my terminology is wrong; maybe what I called the subfloor is really the underlayment. Beneath the 3-inch wide pine planks are huge (2x12s?) planks laid diagonally. That’s what’s on the joists. Our house is pier and beam, so we’re above a crawl space (just big enough for racoons, but very difficult for workmen to get under the house).
Our big problem with the floor is that one of the joists bowed. The summit runs right through the center of the kitchen. We thought the foundation was sinking, but the foundation people said it was fine. It is pretty obvious (by the way the cabinets were constructed) that the floor bowed up early in the life of the house and everything else built around it. — mss
Amazing! Keep up the good work and keep posting progress. Looks like you guys are going gangbusters.
I just hope we can get it put back together before you see it again. — mss