This post was SUPPOSED to go live yesterday. It was also SUPPOSED to include some photos of flooring actually nailed down. But neither of those things happened.

Bummer.

But let me back up and start at the beginning.

First of all, we did get a lot done over the weekend. So I’m happy about that. But I think I should also be allowed to be disappointed things didn’t go as well as we planned.

We started by clearing all the clutter and furniture out of the room Friday night. The TV was the last thing to go because the Royals were playing so we left it in there so we could watch while we worked.

Then, we started ripping up carpet. It was fun until we realized what a pain it was to pull out all the staples that were left behind. Ugh.

My hands were seriously sore all weekend. But, it was an “easy” job I could do while Wyatt was doing the heavy lifting, so I stuck at it.

We used one of the giant appliance boxes in our garage to hold all the tack strips to avoid stepping on them or ripping up a trash bag.

We went to bed Friday night with pretty much all the carpet gone, so that was pretty good progress.

Then, Saturday we got a late start because we both had some things to do that morning. Saturday afternoon was supposed to be our final demo day and then be the start of prepping to lay down the floor.

But…Wyatt ended up having a bad headache and taking a long nap that afternoon. So, while I continued on with demo, I made slower progress.

I managed to get the hallway done on my own, removing tack strips with the hammer and pry bar, and removing more (and more and more and more) staples.

 

I also got started on the entryway, prying up the wood floor that was there.

But then, I got stuck because I couldn’t get it up anymore than that. When we finally felt better, he was able to get all the entryway flooring up. (Using his crazy brute strength, of course. I couldn’t even budge the stuff.)

 

Since the flooring was glued down to a thin sheet of plywood, and the plywood was nailed down, it was way easier to take it out in one big sheet by prying/pulling up the plywood rather than scraping up all the floor piece by piece. That glue us no joke. But, it wouldn’t quite fit between the walls as we lifted it up. So, we ended up cutting it right in the middle to take it out in two sheets.

This is Wyatt’s “Stop taking pictures and help me” face.

At first, we considered saving this flooring since it was in big sheets, but we didn’t have any ideas for how to really use it.

(A table top–nah, flooring somewhere–where?) It’s a weird shape, and it would have to be nailed down somehow since the flooring was already glued to the plywood. Plus, it had some minor damage and wear, so it wasn’t brand new. So, in the end, we decided to just toss it.

Then, we tackled the stair railing. We’re removing this and replacing it with something kinda cool (more on that later). If you don’t follow me on Instagram, go check out my video of how wobbly this thing was, here.

We wanted to save as much as possible so it could be reused somewhere (or be donated to the ReStore) so Wyatt was careful removing all the spindles.

Once all those were removed, we removed all the nails we could easily get out and then got to work on the railing.

There were a BUNCH of nails holding it on, but clearly, it wasn’t all that effective.

And now, we’re both just trying not to fall down the stairs. 🙂

Then, we headed out to watch the Royals lose a World Series games, so no more progress was made that night, for us or the Royals.

On Sunday afternoon we did finally finish all* the demo. That included removing random carpet and such, like from the coat closet.

*We still have to demo the laundry room but that will happen at the latest day possible to avoid being without a washer and dryer.

Unfortunately, Sunday, we also realized we were going to have to remove all the baseboard trim and replace it. In some places, it was too low for the hardwood to fit underneath so it would have to be removed to lay the new flooring. In other places, it was too high for the hardwood and it would have left a gap after the flooring was laid under it.

We could have used some quarter round trim to hide that gap, but I don’t really like the look of that, so we decided to just remove it, in hopes of reusing it. But, we pretty soon learned it was going to be better to just replace it considering that it had already been removed once before (when I painted it all 2 years ago) and was in sort of bad shape. Removing it again proved to be pretty damaging to it.

So, not only do we now have the added work of buying, cutting, painting, and installing new baseboards, we also have the added expense. It won’t break the bank, but it’s still an unexpected cost I’m bummed about. Plus, I painted all the trim already! (Ugh…it was hard to not feel like that was wasted time, but I know I’m happy to have had the white trim for 2 years, so I’m trying to not fall into that trap.)

But…after I resigned myself to this fact, we got to work removing all the old trim. We quickly realized we needed a place to put it…so we had to stop working inside and work outside. Keep in mind, anytime you’re demoing anything, there ends up being a bunch of crap to get rid of.

We got the trailer loaded with all our debris (carpet, cardboard, trim, etc.) and the garage now looks about 100 times better, so that’s good.

Finally, we did a lot of sweeping and removing more staples (they are hard to see in some places and you keep finding more you missed). All of this involved moving our couch and love seat across the room several times to get it out of the way. Yay for moving furniture around multiple times in one day, right?

And, then, it was time for actually prepping the floors, which we’ll tell you about in the next post. Basically, this was a frustrating weekend of “behind-the-scene” progress. And *SPOILER* yesterday was also  frustrating as we got ready to actually start laying down the floor.

But, I think we may finally be ready to start that process soon, so I’m hoping my frustration will soon turn into shrieks of joy when I get to walk on our beautiful floors for the first time.  Plus, we got to hang out with friends and watch some baseball, (1/3 wins this weekend) and eat yummy snacks. So the weekend wasn’t a total loss, not at all!

And I knew going into this project it would be a high-effort, high-reward kind of project. I mean, really, tackling the new floors would have been a big job even without around having gutted and rebuilt our kitchen. Sheesh.

Did you have an awesome weekend? A frustrating couple of days? Tell us about it in the comments below!