Farmhouse Floors

 We finally decided to tackle the floors! We had originally wanted to save these hardwoods, but it became apparent that that wasn't going to happen. Maybe it could have, but it would have cost thousands of dollars and a lot of work done by a professional in order to do it. We decided our best course of action would be to rip them up and install laminate floors instead. 

It took a LONG time to decide on flooring...like months. The main problem was that I had chosen a brown wood-floor looking tile for the kitchen, anticipating that we would be able to save the old wood floors. Now that we had to rip them out I was kicking myself for not choosing something else that would go better visually with brown-wood looking laminate floors. 

T did NOT want to rip out the kitchen tile, completely understandably, because they were less than 3 years old and had been a lot of work for him and Grandpa to put in. So I went back and forth trying to figure out what kind of laminate wouldn't clash with the kitchen tile, but basically I just wore down until I didn't care enough to fight for the change anymore. I still don't love that the 90% of the main floor is laminate and the kitchen is a semi-close tile but hopefully I will learn to live with it. 

We cleared out the living and dining room and started demoing. 

We had to eat our meals in tight quarters for 3 full days.

 

 

It was supposed to be a family work day, but after Boo and Peanut both got hit in the face with boards (separate incidents) we let them off the hook and did everything ourselves. 

 

Lunch time!

 

 

We had put the shiplap over the top of the old floor so it took some finagling and power tools to get it out. 

 

 

 

 The demo wasn't terribly easy, but it was doable and we had it all out in a couple of hours.

 

I think I made nine trips to the burn pile with the tractor...that thing sure does come in handy for jobs like these!

 

 

It was drizzling that day and Jax was a muddy mess!

 

 

We finished demo by about 2 that afternoon and T headed to town to pick up the laminate. This was his second time. The first time he hooked up the trailer, drove all the way to the city, only to discover they somehow lost our entire pallet of flooring! Good grief. 

While he was gone I thought I would demo the fireplace tile. Easy peasy...or not. The rows on the edges popped off easily, sometimes the whole tile coming in one piece. After that not so much.

 

 

One hour.

 

 

Two hours.

 

 

Three hours...at that point it was coming off in tiny chips, I couldn't get anything bigger than a dime with each whack.

 

 

Then T finally got home and realized that they had apparently set the tile directly into wet concrete so it was basically fused together. He got out his 5 foot steel bar and after another hour of beating we finally had it. 

 

 

Some of the concrete crumbled away in the process, and I was sore for three days after all that beating and chipping away at it, but it will look much nicer with some updated, un-cracked tile! 

More pictures tomorrow!