Like a cake, the first piece is the hardest to get out. So, I decided that the first piece to come out would be the patches, and I would work out from there. Here you can see the first stages of removal:
I started out by using the claw end of a hammer to pry up the boards, but a much better tool arrived with my brother, a rolling head pry bar. A standard pry bar was to thick to slide under the boards. But the rolling head bar, with a giant screwdriver to lift the edge of the board, worked great:
I worked on the floor for about an hour and a half before Ricky got there, and we had the whole floor up, and the area cleaned up in just 4 hours:
We only had two casualties:
Yeah, the top one is me. I scraped myself with a nail tossing broken boards out the window. Yes, we are lazy bastards and threw the trash boards out the window. I mean, come ON, that is where the garbage cans sit, so why not? It did earn me some interesting looks from the neighbor as a rain of broken plywood, tackstrip, and flooring slats came flying out of the bay window.
Those boards that were salvageable went into the basement for storage, so they can be used to repair other floors in the house:
The last step is to sweep, pull the nails left behind in the subfloor, and running over everything with a shop vac. Since I am EXHAUSTED right now, and every muscle in my body feels like a little fist, the nails can wait until tomorrow. Or even Monday when J gets back from visiting his brother in Chicago.
Hmmmm....think I should have mentioned to him that I was doing this while he was gone?
2 comments:
He doesn't know you were ripping up the floor??? Wasn't that a show called, "While You Were Out"? Good luck (with the floor and the husband!)
Yeah, but don't they normally finish the job on While You Were Out? He just gets to come home to all the dining room furniture in the foyer, a pile of wood in the yard, and the ripped up carpet on the front porch, ner!
Post a Comment