Once there was a floor.....and now it is no more

This illustrates how much we could chisel off at a time.

I can't say I have ever been so happy to see concrete instead of flooring...

This was one of my favorite floors in the house but sadly it was lost to water damage from Hurricane Ike. So after a year we finally decided it was time to replace it. Like all home improvement projects it has been a slow process and we are only half way.

Old Floor

The original floor was glue-down engineered wood adhered to the concrete foundation (welcome to the wonderful world of no basements). It too was a do-it-yourself jobber. I firmly believe that Ike could have ripped our home off its foundation and that floor would have stayed comfortably glued.

Jared’s goal was to rip it out the week I was gone. After 8 hours of working on it he called and said it only had a 2*8 foot space cleared and that was after he bought out half of the Home Depot tool section. (Never send a man to buy tools, just because it “looks cool” does not mean it works. And if anyone is looking for some manly looking tools, I have a whole garage full, and they work wonderfully cough* cough* :).

When we got back from Iowa we decided it was time to hit it hard. We ended up purchasing an air chisel (which Jared was thrilled about) and a good set of hand chisels. So while he got to play with his new toy, his wife got to use the hammer and hand chisel. The project required both since sometimes the air chisel would just shred the flooring. It was many pain-staking hours of removing the floor inch-by-inch. We soon found out the original installer used way too much glue, thus each hit of the hammer would only remove 1-2” of flooring.

No, this is not to show off my sexy side, Eliza brought me "lunch" (the play cooking and strawberry on the floor)

Wood all removed

Just when we thought the worst was over, we hit the granite. I called my parents to see the best way to “pop” the granite tiles. There was non popping, each required sever hits with a sledge hammer and then required a hand chisel to remove the shards (still glued to the floor of course).

The granite

And then we were left with the glue (my new four-letter word). After two gallons of commercial-grade adhesive stripper, two days and a lot of final elbow grease we found concert. we patched a couple of holes in the concrete and celebrated not having a floor.

The Glue (we had a large outdoor trash can just of stripped glue).

Over all we have 40+ hours in demolition only :S We currently think the clean concrete floor is the most beautiful addition to our house in months!

Its clean!

This weeks goal is to seal the floor with a vapor barrier (for real wood floors) and then maybe just maybe start laying flooring. And yes we are laying glue-down wood flooring so the next own can have the same wonderful experience!