What Goes Down Must Come Up

Needless to say, work on the cottage this summer has been slow. Time and money (or lack thereof!) has a way of causing plans to come to a screeching halt.

Not to be deterred, though, we've gone ahead and moved along with some of our demolition work. Afterall, it's free! One thorn in my side since we bought this place four years ago has been the flooring in the kitchen. The lino itself, the color and pattern, wasn't that bad, but it was not in the best of shape and had been poorly installed. Also, for some reason, there was a lovely flooring hump right in the middle of the room where the new kitchen addition was added to the old part of the house many years ago. For four years, we've wondered what caused the hump and if it was something that could be fixed.

So this weekend, we ripped out the top layer lino, the luan backing that was under it, and the original lino that had been installed when the house built. Seeing that original lino was quite a shock as I'm not a particular fan of harvest gold! And I'm pretty sure this it was the very same lino that was in our kitchen when I was a little girl!

So on with the photos!

The demolition begins...


Ah. The hump. I felt like we were exposing the spine of the kitchen when we got to this part. What was causing the hump? When the kitchen addition was added by the previous owners, it was ever so slightly higher than the old part of the kitchen. Instead of putting down new plywood on both the new and old part of the house and overlapping the plywood from the old side to the new side (thus joining the two parts together almost seamlessly), they tried to butt the new plywood and the old plywood together. They tried to chip away and sand down part of floor joist by a quarter of an inch to make the floor more level, but it didn't work. I don't think they chipped away quite enough. So then, they just smoothed over the descrepency with lots and lots and lots of some plaster like material. They did the same thing in the dining area where the room was enlarged during the last remodel. We couldn't believe how the subflooring was so piece milled together. No wonder the lino looked so horrible! You can enlarge the first photo at the beginning of this entry for a detailed explanation of everything that is wrong with our dining and kitchen flooring.





This old harvest gold lino against the primer green on the walls made me feel a bit nauseous. I couldn't get that flooring up fast enough! Mom, does this flooring look familiar?



So this is our flooring for now (below - and what flooring?). Pretty, isn't it?! We will be replacing the plywood subflooring before putting down our hardwood - but our new hardwood won't be going down anytime soon. We still have too much messy work to do and I don't want anything to happen to it. In the meantime - yuck, we'll have to live with this. And did I mention that it stinks? It smells like musty old linoleum. Maybe we'll at least replace the subflooring soon so I don't have to deal with the smell. Ah, the joys of remodeling. Well, at least I hope to have some great before and after pictures one of these days. It can only get better from here!