Tuesday, February 8, 2011

The crowbar that rescued me…

The 2011 winter season thus far has certainly been an interesting one. Recently mother nature poured enough snow on our wonderful Massachusetts state that I think it will be well after May before it’s gone… On one day, mother nature poured about 2 feet of snow. Since that day, the snow has continued to fall. The snow has been piling up and I really don’t know where it’s all going to go… Well that is a silly statement, we all know it’s going to eventually melt… But if it snows again, it’s going to be extremely difficult to enjoy summer…

I have to admit, beside having to snow blow the driveway every other day, I can finally have time to finish the apartment. I’ve been working on this house for a long time and I still have a lot that needs to be done. I have one final major renovation that needs to be completed. A lot of the things that still need to be done to the apartment are small. But this one project could not hold out any longer. The lovely hallway floor… I started this little project back in December 2009 (So much to do...). Yes it has been awhile… But it’s time to push this bad boy to the top of the list..

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For the last year I’ve been living with the floor looking like this. I had started to remove this portion of the floor, but it was extremely difficult at the time, so I decided to change projects… Well later is now…

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This pictures shows a good reason for my problem. The floor has two layers of Linoleum floor and a concrete backing…Actually, the concrete backing is a floor level that cures like concrete… The entire floor was covered with this stuff. The flooring level was more of a headache then doing any good.

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I had to peel the top layer of the linoleum like an orange. I have to admit, removing the floor layer was extremely exhausting. It took me about 2 days to remove the rind like surface. Two days later, here I am…The first layer of the floor completed.

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The next step was a little more difficult to complete then removing the linoleum flooring. Once I removed the top layer linoleum flooring, I discovered two layers of Luan plywood that were .25 inch thick. This could explain why the floor had an excessive amount of drywall screws and floor level compound…

Initially, I was going to use an adhesive remover to get access to the drywall screws. Basically, I was going to remove the rind like surface and then unscrew the Luan Plywood off… But I realized that it would take me even longer… So enter the Search and Rescue Crowbar…

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The search and rescue crowbar was my tool of choice when removing the Luan Flooring… As you can see, underneath the Luan flooring was the wonderful corkboard plywood…

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As you can see from the picture above, the corkboard absorbs any liquids that falls on it. You can also note the drywall screws used to secure the Luan Plywood in the top picture

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I finally removed the crappy flooring… Next on the list is to remove the corkboard flooring and replace it with 1/2 –3/4 inch plywood. After that, I’m going with the peel and stick flooring… Anyway, until next time happy building…

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