Peeling Away History

My house was built in 1954. Every time one of the previous owners decided on new flooring for the kitchen, they must have just put the new flooring right on top of the existing flooring.

The first layer was the glossy, very slippery when wet, tile. I had fallen twice, and broke a toe nail because the floors were super slick. It had turned into a major safety hazard since the backdoor was right there, and in Michigan any time it rained or snowed (which is all the time) the glossy tiles would get wet.

The gloss tiles were mortared onto several layers of linoleum. Once the gloss tiles were broken off the ground, which took hours, we took a break and left the old linoleum flooring for about a week. Since we knew that once we took out the rest of the flooring we would need to take out the cabinets. The older layers of floor went underneath the cabinets. Since we were not ready to say goodbye to our kitchen sink and counter space yet, we figured one more week would be best.

 

Once we decided to take out all of the flooring, we took it down to the sub-floor and could see into the basement. When we took everything out, flooring and cabinets, my step dad realized that a previous owner cut out some of the sub-floor and support beams underneath the sink area for some reason. We needed to correct this. He added 2x4’s in place where the support beams had previously been cut out. We added ply wood where the subfloor was missing. In doing this, we had to drill out 1” holes for the plumbing to still be accessible for the sink.

For all the tile and garbage we couldn’t put most things out to the curb on garbage day so we bought this big green bag sold at Home Depot and Lowe’s that are made by Waste Management called Bagster. We fill the bag and schedule a pick up time online with Waste Management and they come collect the whole bag from the front yard. It ended up costing like $30 for the bag and then $100 for them to pick it up, but it was worth the hassle of finding somewhere else to take it, which was probably going to cost money as well. I would recommend the “Green bags” to any one working on a project where there are bulky items that cannot be put out with regular trash. The Bagster @ Lowe's

We took the bottom cabinets we removed to the curb on garbage day (my city picks up bigger items, as long as there are no drawers or any some parts attached) because there were many oil stains inside and the configurations weren’t best for the space. In the corner of the kitchen, instead of using a lazy Susan or cabinet designed for a corner, there were two cabinets glued together and there was a ton of wasted storage space.

So we scrapped the lower cabinets but we decided to keep the upper cabinets for a possible bar in the basement, a future project I am thinking about starting this summer J.