That was a shame, because I could barely remember what we did. I just got around to downloading the pictures today, and luckily they jogged my memory nicely.
Last weekend we made great progress on the electrical, and we also framed for where the fireplace and bookshelf will be. In order to do that framing, though, we had to tear up the floor down to the subfloor. I was actually pretty excited to do this, and not only because it wasn't nearly as fussy as the electrical work my spouse was trying to do. I was actually looking forward to seeing what sort of newspaper we would turn up this time, since I remembered what we found the last time we tore up the floor in that area.
The floor came up very easily last time. Not so this time.
Here's the floor with the topmost layer of flooring taken off, exposing the wainscoting layer underneath. That layer was relatively easy to remove, even though some of the nails were tough, simply because it was an actual flooring product.
The second layer wasn't fun at all. Not only were there a bazillion little nails, but the wainscoting would just shatter if I tried to apply any pressure to it. The nailheads would tear right through the wood, too, so I ended up with all these little spikes. Needless to say, we will not be using this technique or material for flooring in the future. Not that we would have considered it for a moment, but our opinions were merely cemented by the experience.
Underneath the wainscoting was a layer of whatever the precursor to linoleum or vinyl was. Maybe it was linoleum, I have no idea. At any rate, it was the stuff that had a wood pattern on it, the stuff that was the original floor of the house. That went, too.
And finally we were down to the newspaper. They were all from fall/winter 1934, which was very cool. More pics of the papers in a moment. Once the papers were peeled away, we were left with the original subfloor, which was very cool-looking. Too bad we can't just refinish and use those as our floors, but we really would like to actually have a subfloor, and plus it would be tough to replicate that throughout the rest of the room.
I tried really hard to save some of the newspaper, but it was just too adhered to the floor. I'm hopeful that when we start tearing up the rest of the floor, we can get a big enough piece in good enough condition to preserve. I took too many to post here, but I think you get the idea.
And this one was just too appropriate:
I'm going to try to post the rest of what we did last weekend, which involved pretty much ripping out another wall in the nook, as well as what we did this past weekend. It involves heaters and much happiness.
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