The days are long when you get up at 5:30 to go to work and then come home and work late. Nan and the kids did their darndest to get the the old adhesive up but it wasn’t working very well So when I got home from work I decided to try and see if I could rent a machine to help make it easier to strip the adhesive up. It worked but I had to stop and re attach the teeth to it a lot because they kept coming off. The machine was pretty easy to work though because even Chris was able to push it and make it eat away at the adhesive. While he did that I worked some more on the joint between the old and new slab to make it smooth. I was beat tired before the night was up.
We didn’t take as many pictures today. Sam and her grandma came over to help Nan and Daniel paint while I was at work. When I got home we had to figure out how to make the floor level so the new tile would lay flat near where the old/new floor joint is and break down the heavy threshold where the original back door of the house was. That cement was harder than normal concrete. Jimm brought over a small hand held jack hammer and we were able to chip away at the cement. Other friends like Gary page and his kids came over to help scrap up the tar adhesive that held the original wood parquets down. That stuff is hard to chip up.
Here are some pictures we took today.
So here we are and yesterday we tore the house up. We got up in time for late church and then went out for something to eat. Jimm came by to fix the section of the foundation we messed up yesterday. Mixed some cement and mortar and fixed the base of the wall.
We got a door to put in the opening and it turns out I had to narrow the opening and make it shorter to get the door to fit. We got it in though so we can at least close the door and we can lock it too. Lucky loves it because he can see out now. We pulled the countertop from the wall and I started peeling up the glued down vinyl tile that was in the kitchen. Meanwhile Nan started painting the dark wood paneling to make the house a little brighter.
These are some pictures we took today.
On a whim I decided to finally tackle replacing the floors. When we bought this house back in ‘98, the house had wall-to-wall carpet except for the bathrooms and kitchen. We pulled the carpet up to reveal beautiful wood floors… problem was the house had been expanded and there was no corresponding expansion on the wood, so it was bare concrete from the beginning of the addition and the joint where the old wall was was indented down a couple of inches.
Without moving furniture I went outside and got a shovel and started popping parquet tiles up. The rest is history. We did a LOT of demolition today. You’ll be able to see that it didn’t take long for the project to grow.
We worked till 1:10 in the morning and called it quits. With no window and no way to lock the house.
