In addition to planting flowers, visiting family, and watching soccer this past weekend, we also ripped out the floor in our kitchen.

Yup, we’re now down to the subfloor, in the whole kitchen, not just under where the cabinets were.

We had to remove the flooring to make room for the new flooring…remember WAY BACK when we talked about picking out our new floors, here? Well, we haven’t forgotten about them, they’ve been patiently waiting for us to get ready to install them.

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That meant clearing out all the tools and stuff as much as possible before we got started…including moving all the pantry items to the living room and shoving all the appliances onto one side of the room.

I have to admit that Wyatt came up with a pretty brilliant plan to remove the flooring since it was glued down to the linoleum underneath and not wanting to budge.

He located the seams for the wooden underlayment (not sure that’s the correct term, but you get the idea of a thin sheet of wood on top of the subfloor but below the linoleum, right?) and then marked those lines across the entire floor.

This helps explain it a little more:

Then, he set his circular saw at the perfect depth to cut through the hardwood flooring and linoleum (but not into the subfloor).

He then cut along those seams and essentially divided the floor into big chunks that we could remove all in one piece. He also sliced through any remaining stuck linoleum with a knife.

At that point, we got the prybar and mustered up the strength to simply lift/pry/tug/pray the big chucks of floor up. The underlayment was stapled into the subfloor, so it was a lot easier to use the prybar to loosen those and lift it up than it would have been to have to scrape the floor off of the linoleum.

Still, it wasn’t all easy. Those giant chunks of flooring were HEAVY.

In a few places, we had to cut a seam because the boards were too big to handle (or they would reach up the ceiling). I got to support it while Wyatt sliced through it at the bottom. (Yes, we wore masks…we figured there was a lot of chemicals in the glue used to create the engineered floor and slicing through those boards left a LOT of smelly sawdust we wanted to avoid breathing in.)

Plus, the edges were more difficult. All the doorways had a TON of nails in them so work around.

We used the little SoniCrafter to cut the flooring where it met the wall. (I say “we” because this became my job after Wyatt showed me what to do this first time.)

And, we had to cut more seams in the little nook area to get that flooring up because we weren’t ready to remove the flooring from the laundry room yet.

And even then, it didn’t really want to come up and ended up really fighting us…but Wyatt won, of course. Because he’s a beast when it comes to things requiring brute strength. 🙂

And we had to remove the baseboard trim (and ended up breaking a few pieces of it in the process of doing that).

But we eventually ended up with more flooring in the pile in the garage than we had in the kitchen.

Although at times, we also had a pile in the kitchen…

In a few places, the linoleum peeled up easily from the wooden underlayment, so that meant we had to take out the three layers in two steps instead of one step, but that made things a little easier to handle, so it wasn’t too much extra work.

I thought the bottom of the linoleum had a nice, encouraging message for us…

It was really hard work, and Wyatt was super tired when we were finished. I was tired, too, but since he had been doing all the heavy lifting, I let him go to bed that night a little after 10. (We’re usually up until 11:30 or midnight.)

Plus, it was really messy. I swept every few minutes to control the sawdust…

But there was still a LOT of dust, as we found when we started vacuuming the subfloor after we were done.

One good part of this is that it means we are one step closer to installing cabinets and getting those boxes out of the living room.

One bad part of this is that I got a splinter from walking on the subfloor with barefeet, soo…we’re now a “shoes-at-all-times” household. It helped to clean everything as well as we could, but it’s still rough wood. Good thing it’s only temporary…I hope!

Unfortunately, we found that the door to our back deck wasn’t installed properly and had been leaking. (Which explains why there were ants over there…if water can get in, so can ants!)

It’s not too bad yet (thankfully we caught it before things started to rot or mold!) but it’s another step we’ll have to add to this seemingly-never-ending project.

Still, we’re happy to have the flooring gone. I can’t believer we’re STILL demoing things out of this kitchen. You’d think we could have demoed it three times by how much stuff we’ve taken out of there compared to how much we’ve put back in.

Ah well, there’s no rush, right? We can just keep working on our kitchen forever and live happily ever after doing dishes in the sink…NOT. The new goal is to be mostly done by Labor Day…so we’ll cross our fingers and try to kick things into high gear around here!

Ever ripped out a floor? Ever re-installed a door that’s leaking? What about flooring? If so, want to come help us!? Just kidding…kind of…