What lies beneath...

It has been about a week and a half since the last blog entry. I was in the middle of drywalling, and since I knew the floor we were ordering (Armstrong Chamblis 2 Slate Block Bronze, if you're wondering) would take 2 weeks to arrive, I thought, "We should order that so I'm not sitting around after finishing the drywall."

Ha.

So Sarah and I go to Home Depot to order the floor. The rolls are 12' wide. Most of our kitchen is around 11' wide, but there's a small section 5 1/2' long that's about 13 1/2' or so.  2 feet of that 5 1/2' will be covered by base cabinets.  Unfortunately, to ensure proper seam/matching/whatever, we had to order 6' x 12', or 72 square feet extra, to get the ~6 square feet we'll need.  Awesome.  At least we'll have enough extra to do the mud room (maybe) or bathroom.  Someday.

Old floor.  Ugh.

New floor.  Oooo.

So we order the floor, and the salesperson, who used to own a flooring company with her husband, asks if it'll be going over the existing floor.  We said no, we would be removing the old vinyl floor, we didn't want the increased height.  (Apparently you can put new vinyl over old vinyl, but we didn't want to do that.)  "You're going to need to replace the underlayment."  Huh, okay. I naively assumed that I could pull up the old vinyl floor, scrape the old glue off, put new glue on, and reuse the underlayment (1/4" plywood).  So we finished our order, went over and looked at the underlayment.  Not bad at all, $11 for a 4x8 sheet, and it looked nice and good quality.  All we had to do was rip up the older underlayment, and put the new stuff down.

Ha.

I go home, rip up a bit of the vinyl, and realize I probably never could have scraped/sanded/whatever to reuse the old underlayment.  Remember, totally naive about floors.  Then I started prying up the old underlayment.  

Huh.  (No ha this time.)

It seems that the floor is a sandwich, starting at the bottom, of:

3/4" plywood sub floor.

3/4" plywood underlayment.

Quite thin super groovy original 1964 linoleum floor.

1/4" dry and splintery plywood underlayment.

Early 90's vinyl floor.

This wouldn't be a problem at all if the installers of early 90s floor had installed the underlayment like normal people, and not the evil, spiteful people they were.  The 4x8 sheets of underlayment are nailed every inch around the perimeter, and every 2" across the sheet itself.  Every inch around the perimeter of a 48x96 sheet would be...  288 nails.  Every 2 inches across the reset of the sheet would be, ignoring the perimeter rows, 22 rows of 46 nails each...  Over 1000 nails there.  Almost 1300 nails total for each 32 square foot, 4x8 sheet.  I just spent several minutes checking my calculations, and even after all the work we did, that still seems like an excessive number.  Someone please correct me if I'm wrong.  Assuming the calculations are correct, taking into account the 2' where there was no floor under the old cabinets, that's still almost 200 square feet of flooring...  Approximately 7200 nails.  We're saving them and going to weigh them to get a better estimate.  

It gets better.  They're not wimpy little nails.  They're nice, 1 1/2" ring shank nails.  And the best part of all?  Removing the nails is the easy part!  Yes, that's sarcasm.

The nails are so close together, that it's difficult to get anything under them to pry up the wood.  A pry bar or chisel will occasionally work, but usually, the wood just shreds.

Evil, evil floor installers

I realize after an hour, that I don't have to worry about sitting around idle while we wait for the floor to arrive.

Little by little, the underlayment goes away.  Tuesday night by myself.  Thursday night with Sarah.  Friday night with Sarah.  Saturday all day with Sarah and her dad.  After 34 man-hours of work, this is what we had left:

The rest of Saturday and Sunday were periods of pain and rest.  Monday night, after another 10 hours of work (3 people, 3+ hours each), we're done ripping all the old underlayment up.  44 hours total.  Another 2 hours of prying up nails, and our floor will be clean and ready for the new underlayment.

Wouldn't you know it, I got a call from Home Depot this morning, that our floor is in.  Pretty good timing.  Just have to get the old floor debris moved/cleaned up first, before I can get the new floor in the garage.

This was taken about halfway through the floor removal, so the pile is larger now.

When I install the new underlayment, I'm going to staple it every 2" around the perimeter, and 4-6" across the rest of it.  I wont be evil to the next people who tackle this floor.  Once that's done, we'll install the floor, prime and paint the walls, and then be ready for cabinets...  Getting there!