Kitchen Floor Surgery

Good morning, everyone! I hope you all have had a great September so far. Thank you for all your sweet messages and well wishes in my last post - I'm really looking forward to getting back to blogging!

I had a wonderful visit with my mother and it was so hard dropping her off at the airport yesterday. Little did I know a couple of weeks ago that we would finally be laying the hardwood that had been stored in the garage for three years.She is such a hardworking person who was more than happy to help us with some really heavy duty work around here. While I thought we would pass some of our time going junking, sewing, or other light weight fun activities, she was instead helping to rip out old subflooring in the kitchen, leveling out dips in the floor, hauling in heavy boxes of hardwood, and assisting in the actual install of the new flooring. Little did I know a couple of weeks ago that we would finally be removing the unsightly "hump" in our kitchen floor and laying the hardwood that had been stored in the garage for three years. I can't even remember how it came about that my mother and I decided that we'd try to coax hubs into performing surgery on our floor {to remove the "hump" that has been there since we bought the house}. Hubs couldn't believe that we'd actually give up junking for such dirty work, but he was on board and so we all tackled the floor together!

You'll see in the first photo above what our original kitchen flooring looked like. Believe me when I say that the photo makes the flooring look a lot nicer than it actually was, and you also can't see the hideous hump in the middle of floor which was the result of the previous owners trying to mesh the kitchen addition with the old part of the house. The hump, {or the protruding backbone of my kitchen as I've called it} has always driven me a little bonkers. First of all, I wasn't sure what was causing it. Second of all, I was worried that there was nothing we could do about it and that it would make laying hardwood flooring a nightmare. I remember one day a couple of years back, I just couldn't take it anymore. I had to find out what was going on with the hump, so I ripped out the linoleum with hubs help. Under the lino was a thin layer of plywood, lots of some kind of concrete patch, and this lovely yellow flooring which nearly burned my eyes out.



What a mess that concrete patch was! I think the previous owner was trying to fill in the big gap between the old and new parts of the house. We had to break it all up with a hammer to remove it.






I was so relieved when we removed that yellow lino...Even the ugly subloor looked better in comparison!



We weren't yet ready to pull up the rest of the flooring to fix the hump or install our hardwood {we were getting ready to host a party and it also just wasn't in our budget at the time} so we just painted over the mess with cheap white paint for the time being. Note to readers: Never use cheap white paint to paint your floors. They will never look clean. But I lived with it like this for two years, sometimes biting my tongue about it, but not often.



To my delight, though, the "hump" underwent major surgery two weeks ago.



Old subflooring was removed,



...the hump was sanded down as far as we could get it,



... and new plywood subflooring was added.



{By the way, who needs a dog house when your husband can sleep under the floor when you're mad at him?}



The hump was just about all gone after all of this, but my mom and I added some floor leveler over the plywood to smooth out a couple of dips caused by the slight height difference between the kitchen addition and dining room. I must say that at the point the photo below was taken, my middle child declared that "our kitchen floor is getting uglier by the day".

See that weird, colorfully wrapped thing hanging from the ceiling? That's the light above our kitchen island that we kept whacking our heads on for two weeks. I thought that if we covered it with something bright and patterned {an old vintage sheet}, we'd still have some sense left by the end of the project.

Yeah...that didn't work.



I was still reluctant to believe that all this subfloor prep work would totally solve the height difference problem, but I can say that now that the 3/4 inch hardwood has been installed, you would never, ever know that we had a hump backed kitchen. Surgery was a complete success!

We still have a little bit of hardwood to lay in front of the french doors because we need to spline a transition door piece {add a "tongue" to the transition piece where it currently just has a groove so that it connects to the flooring properly} - and what do you know - there is only one place to buy splines around here. They were closed when we were working on the flooring this weekend, so we just went as far as we could go. I've since read that you can just make splines yourself, but we didn't know that then.

I'll share photos of the new flooring soon. I still can't believe that finally, FINALLY, we have one room with some nice, shiny flooring. I thank my mother for motivating and helping us to tackle this project while she was here to help and hubs for his skillful execution!