Tommy decided he needed a vacation (i.e. time away from the coffee shop), since he rarely has more than 1 day off at a time. So, I decided to join him for a few days of vacation. This is what we did on our staycation. You may be thinking this is the "After" version. Oh no no no, my friends. This is the "Before" version of the first floor living space.
So, here's the story. The previous owners laid this thin Pergo flooring, which was OK (some may even say nice). But, we were fascinated with the hardwood that lay just beneath that Pergo. It consumed our thoughts whenever we walked over that rickety Pergo. Well, maybe not consumed, but it definitely bothered us.
Well, we got to the bottom of it, but it wasn't easy. Tommy made pretty fast work of ripping up the Pergo. It always seems like the demolition takes so much less time than the reconstruction.
This was an interesting find: a cement-like agent used over the hardwood for leveling the Pergo floor. It was interesting in that it smelled of urine.
We were really regretting our decision when we first saw the condition of the hardwood under the Pergo...as evidenced by Tommy's face.
Goose! No time for fun and games. This is a working vacation.
Amazing what a TON of scrubbing, scraping and mopping can do. The pre-clean side is on the left. The semi-clean side is to the right.
Making some serious progress and expelling some major elbow grease.
About 8 hours of serious scrubbing later...not bad! The next step is to sand and buff the floor, then refinish with a few coats of polyurethane. We'll probably need another vacation to do that. ;-)
3 comments:
I hope you're wearing respirators. That black mastic you're scraping may be of the asbestos variety, as commonly used as the glue for carpet and vct tile back in the day, sanding will put more of the particulate in the air. I would have used bean-e-doo and a squeegee, google it.
Came by your blog and it brought back memories of our first house back in 1975. We were broke, pregnant, and faced with lots of fixer upper tasks in our Nebraska home. We took up the horribly ancient and stained carpet to find hardwood floors underneath. We scraped the carpet pad off for days before we could get the floor ready for the next steps. Good work and thanks for the memories!
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