Un-Flooring

We're back, after more illness, more work, and more guests. And, thankfully, a bit more good weather.

Our floor probably wishes we had stayed away longer. The below photo was actually taken a couple of weeks ago (we do work, even if we don't post), and here you can see the completed underlayment of the area that used to be the sun porch. This is what we plan on doing to the entire room, and this weekend we took more steps towards that goal.

Anyway, we had to rip the floor up layer by layer, since each layer was running in a different direction. We also wanted to have a good shot at preserving whatever we could of the newspapers that were the final layer before reaching the subfloor.

Here's me tearing up the oak floor, which is the topmost layer with the fake "pegs".

Here's the next layer exposed, the layer of wainscoting. This stuff was horrible to try to pull up. The nails were rusty, and yet they didn't want to let go, and if we pulled too hard, the stuff would just splinter. Not fun, especially since we were already tired from crouching for so long pulling the first layer up. I don't know how flooring people do it. We managed just fine, but ugh. There was this fine, strange dust everywhere-most of it was dirt and accumulated crap from over the years, but we couldn't help but think of all the shed skin cells, pet hair, etc., that the dust must have contained. If you see little spots in the photos that look like bugs, that's dust. Ewww. Oh well.

You can see some of the splintering here.

Finally, the last layer was exposed. We had thought that it was all that old vinyl stuff with the wood grain print, but it was actually only that around the edges, as you can see in the photo. The rest was black paper, which I assume was the sort that could be used for a vapor barrier or something.

Up that layer came as well, exposing all the newspaper we could ever want. most of it was from 1936, but there were a few mixed in from 1934. Here you can see what the entire floor looked like.

We actually pulled up every single piece and put them all in a pile so we can go through them later. We'll be selecting a couple that we want to get framed/archived so that we can hang it in the house somewhere, and we'll also put a couple of the pages back underneath the underlayment. We're also thinking about putting in a few pages from a current newspaper under there, just as a surprise for anyone who comes after us who might tear up the floor we put in. We really, really enjoyed getting to see all the old newspaper - it was fun and interesting, and sort of transporting, actually. I'll do another post around just some photos of the newspaper later on in the week.

Finally, when the papers were all pulled up, we were left with the old, raw cedar planks of the subfloor. They're in good shape, but they're sure not pretty or even. Still, they're nice and solid, and will be a good foundation for our underlayment.

It's going to seem like a whole new room once the underlayment's in and we don't have to be frightened to walk across the floor anymore. I can't wait until we can put a real floor in, but first things first.