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Friday, April 4, 2014

One Question

As Cory and I progress through demolition of our house there is one question that we find ourselves asking over and over again:

Why did they DO that?

Don't get me wrong.  This house was really well-built and is sturdier than 99% of the homes built today.  The bones are fantastic.  But over the years previous owners have done things that simply leave us scratching our heads.  They also leave us with tons of work to do to get the house ready for renovation.

Exhibit A: The foyer.


Take a moment to soak in that lovely slate floor.  

Now come back with me to the dining room which is to the right of the foyer.

After I pulled off the wallpaper we decided to start removing the wood floors.  This is what the floor of the dining room looked like once the throw rug was removed:


No, folks, that isn't just a ring of dirt around the room.  The wood floor is actually stained that darker color all around the room so that you can see exactly where the rug once was.  I'm guessing this is a result of many years of dirt from wear and tear combined with dust and dirt being blown onto the floor by the radiators.  It's charming.  Or something.

We planned to replace these floors before seeing the condition they were in so this stain made it even less sad for us to start ripping them out of the house.  Cory got the job started along the front wall and between the two of us we removed the floor fairly quickly.  The boards were nailed down so it wasn't super easy, but it wasn't terribly difficult either.


We did have lots of nails to pull out of the subfloor, though.

Okay, back to the foyer and that awesome slate.

So guess what we discovered as we removed all that wood flooring?


Look closely.  Can you guess?

The wood floors run UNDERNEATH the slate!!!!  Seriously, WHY DID THEY DO THAT???

We were dreading removing the slate already because we knew it was set in concrete.  But we didn't imagine that the slate would have been plopped on top of wood.  It now makes sense why there wasn't a proper threshold at the front door: the floor was too high.

So Cory began attacking the floor.  It took days - DAYS - to remove this slate.  It ran all the way to the back of the foyer where the large family room begins, so there was a lot of it to remove.  The first day Cory just chipped at it a bit to see exactly what he was getting into.


And our suspicions were confirmed.  Slate on top of concrete on top of wire mesh on top of wood floors.  There was no less than two inches of material to remove and none of it would be easy.

Dixon was a great helper.  He loaded up buckets of concrete and tiles as Cory broke it up so it could be tossed into the dumpster.


But this job was really big and thankfully my parents came to help us for a day.  It was backbreaking work but they managed to free the foyer of all that unnecessary flooring.

Please folks.  If you want to change your flooring, take the extra time and effort to do it properly. Remove the old before installing the new.  


Spare future owners of your home the crazy amount of work it takes to do things the right way.


No one wants to do this kind of work.

It will all be worth it in the end though.  It will ALL be worth it.

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