Floor removal - Done

After a few more hours of work Tuesday night, the last of the nails were removed from the floor.

• 48 hours of total work to remove
• ~200 square feet of underlayment
• ~15 minutes per square foot
• 18.5 pounds of nails
• 324 nails per pound, that's ~6,000 nails
• 30 nails per square foot

I'm pretty sure the installer got paid by the nail.

Wednesday, we went to pick up the underlayment and the flooring.  The rolls ended up being a lot smaller than I expected.

That's the large roll, 12' wide by 23' long.  The new 4x8 sheets of underlayment are on the right side of the picture.  The old underlayment is that pile on the left.

Because all we had seen was the small in-store sample, we were eager to see what the floor actually looked like.  We unrolled the small roll (12' x 6'), and are very happy with how it looks.

Like most of the work I've done in the kitchen, it's stuff I've never done before.  Flooring is no exception.  I was very intimidated to work with such a large roll, and really, really didn't want to mess up installing the floor.  The manufacturer calls for S-288 adhesive, or S-289 releasable adhesive.  Doing some research, I found that the releasable adhesive has an "unlimited working time".  Meaning, you roll on the adhesive, let it get tacky (45 to 60 minutes), put your floor down, and go over with a 100 pound flooring roller.  Didn't get the position right?  Pull it up, it's pressure sensitive.  Don't like the floor in 10 years?  Pull it up, it's pressure sensitive.  I guess it's primarily used for apartments, where tenants move out and new floors get put down on a semi-regular basis.  It seems like it will work great for me, a novice floor installer.  As popular as Armstrong Flooring is, and as many places there are that sell it...  very, very few places sell the adhesive.  Once I tracked down someone that actually sold it (The Andersons General Store) and saw how much the adhesive costs, my guess is it's because other companies adhesive is much cheaper.  $60 for 1 gallon!  Home Depot sells another manufacturers adhesive for $27 per gallon, but their adhesive doesn't cover as much area ("up to 190sq ft" for the Home Depot vs "250-325 sq ft" for the Armstrong), and would have required 2 gallons.  6 of one, half dozen of the other...

Thursday night, I did another coat of drywall, this time with a 12" knife.  It's looking pretty good at this point, I'll probably sand the walls and be done with them, but do one more coat on the ceiling to get a better old ceiling/new ceiling match.