Kitchen floor layers: Ready for replacement

Starting multiple large projects simultaneously means (for us at least) that they each then take a long time to complete. One of the multiple projects that has been in progress in recent months is redoing the kitchen floor. As of this past weekend, though, all of the old material has finally been removed!

The kitchen floor — much like the nearby dining room floor — had many layers. 

All the way back in February, Sarah started removing them. The top 2, a brown vinyl and a white vinyl, were glued very tightly together, so those 2 layers came off together. 

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The summer kitchen is our temporary storage space for much of the material that we’re removing from the house proper. Some of the big vinyl pieces were the perfect bridge across the muddy driveway on that chilly winter day. 

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Underneath of these 2 layers was a layer of plywood. It seems that this material was intended to fill the function of a subfloor, even though it was not the lowest layer.

While the plywood wasn’t much to look at, simply removing the dark vinyl brightened up the room significantly. Neither of us had previously noticed how dim the brown vinyl made the whole room appear until it was out of the way!

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The plywood came up next on a subsequent trip out to Rockleaf, revealing a very familiar material: a green vinyl-like material. This had been among the dining room’s layers, too, and it also exists in the laundry room (…and inside some of the lower cabinets in the kitchen…). This was the final normal floor layer before getting to the structural parts, so we left it in place until we had a solid plan for what — and when — new flooring would go down. 

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We are looking to have tile in this space, and learning how to effectively tile one of the largest rooms in the house having never done any tile before is beyond our skillset at this time. We have plans to work with John The Tile Guy next month, however, to hopefully get some real flooring in place. (Future post!) We had suspected before talking with him that the subfloor would need to be replaced, and he confirmed our suspicion. 

The kitchen is in the part of the house that was built in the 1970s. It is also the part of the house that suffered the brunt of the poor-yard-drainage-induced water damage. Particle board isn’t known for being a durable material, and the kitchen’s 50-year-old particle board subfloor that had been exposed to moisture was definitely worse for the wear. 

Sarah tackled the most damaged part of the subfloor in April. Subfloor removal in and of itself is not a super difficult task: Find where the nails are, find where each piece’s edges are, get a sturdy pry bar and work away. But removing a subfloor that crumbles with ever strike is a bit more tedious, and that was the case in the corner that had been exposed to the most moisture. Sarah only got about a 3rd of the room completed on the afternoon she set aside for the project and had to leave it there.

With the aid of a friend this past weekend, however, she was able to make rather quick work of the rest of the room, which was thankfully in substantially better shape — and therefor much easier to remove — than what she started out working on. 

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No project ever goes as planned, of course, but we’re hoping that we’ll have new flooring installed here by July. Wish us luck!