Well I’ve never seen that before...

This is a phrase you never want to hear when you are doing any sort of renovation on your house. Since the start of our kitchen project it has been said four times already and it has only been a week!

We wanted/needed to change our flooring. The kitchen expansion cabinet layout was slightly wider than the original tile floor so it needed to be level with the dining room. The tile floor was quite high compared to the hardwood in our house. The flooring guy took one look at the transition between the two rooms and said “Well I’ve never seen that before! And I’ve been doing floors for almost forty years!” He had been in my house for a grand total of two minutes... 

What was he looking at? Our fabulous triple threshold... yes, there were three thresholds nailed together from the dining room to the kitchen. It was something that I tripped over on a daily basis because it should have never been in a house.

Once they started doing actual demolition on my kitchen they came across some more “interesting” peculiarities in my fabulous 1970’s house. There were five layers of flooring including the tiles. Under the tile was a thick layer of grout, followed by a lovely layer of yellow linoleum, a one inch layer of plywood and then the original subfloor.

The tile refused to budge with any amount of human strength available and they had to get something called a tile chipper to remove it. Even with that special machine they had to fight every inch to release it from the floor. Once that was removed they had to pull up the linoleum and one inch plywood. The largest problem was there were just a few extra nails holding the plywood in place. About a thousand extra nails more than necessary! There were so many nails that they had to remove that layer square foot by square foot with crowbars and I think with quite a bit of swearing. Again our “favorite” phrase was used- Wow we’ve never seen this before.

They finally thought they were finished with removal when they realized all the nails in the extra plywood layer had turned the original subfloor into Swiss cheese. Even the central AC lines were riddled with holes... This project was barely started and three days later we were still removing layers of floor.

When the existing sub flooring was taken out it was the consistency of shredded wheat. It just pulled apart with your fingertips. This was due to the fact that the central air pipes were running  directly under the flooring and all the smaller pipes were not connected properly to the main line. Again they looked at me and said “Wow I’ve never seen anything like this before!” After some correct metal taping and sealing our AC was more efficient and not slowly rotting the sub flooring. 

Once that was taken care of the rest of the flooring installation should have been a breeze. Yet my house decided to throw one more curveball- the flooring in the dining room didn’t match the width of the new standard floor boards. Yep we had to take up all the flooring and subfloor in the dining room! Thankfully we did because again the AC pipes were not attached correctly and the subfloor was slowly disintegrating even without the million nails in it. So this pushed the rest of the project another two days back. 

With all these set backs I was sure that I might get my kitchen back by Thanksgiving if we were lucky. But once all the subfloors were set the flooring installed really quick and looks gorgeous. It also doesn’t creak at all! I’m so excited to see the finished results. Stay tuned for what comes next in the kitchen renovation.