My last post ended with me so excited to be about to spring into action, doing some quick demo work on the floor in our kitchen. Famous last words…

We had a very small window of time to work within, my daughter being out on a ‘play date’. John and I laboured at top speed for almost three hours, ripping up vinyl flooring and some kind of crumbly, particleboard-type subfloor that covered what, at one time, was our home’s back porch. It took a bit of finesse to pry some of the particleboard out, as the finished wood trim was already in place. At one point, John was forcing a large piece of the board out from under the wall (nailed where we couldn’t get at it) by rocking it back and forth, and snapped off a small bottom corner of the doorway’s plinth in the process. Fortunately, I noticed it right away and found the piece before it was sucked into oblivion. The piece had broken off cleanly, and with a little wood glue and tape, the doorway was good as new. We were a bit more careful after that. John also patched the holes in the floor where the old heat registers had been located.

While he was busy with that, I had the glorified task of removing the flooring nails that remained sticking up from the floorboards…and there were quite a few of them as you can see.

This part of the job was critical though, because our kid refuses to wear shoes and never walks, but runs around the house with reckless abandon. We knew there would be no way to prevent her from examining every inch of bared wood in her bare feet. I’m a meticulous sort, so this type of thing is actually right up my alley. Every single flooring nail was removed and the floor vacuumed before she arrived home.
Deirdre got to participate in our last task of the day, which was doing a ‘silly walk’ (her own words, but so Python-esque I had to kiss her for it) across every inch of the newly exposed floorboards to find out where they squeaked, and placing screws wherever we found one.
By the end of the day, we had a squeak-free surface that was ready to accept new flooring.

By the end of the next day, we had one houseblogger in excruciating pain, dealing with the return of her dreaded arch-nemesis, the Herniated Disc.

I’m feeling much better today, after almost a week of lying prone on my back and living off muscle relaxants, an anti-inflammatory, pain killers and ice cream. At least I can sit in a chair for a few minutes without wincing. Don’t you just hate it when old injuries come back to bite you on the arse?

Demolition, while kind of fun at the time, is one of those ‘damned if you do, damned if you don’t’ renovation projects. It’s the lousy job you don’t have to pay someone to do if you’re naïve enough to go for it yourself. So we’ve saved some money, and now I can say in all honesty that I’ve busted my back working on this place.
I’ve also discovered that whether you choose the DIY route or hire someone to do the dirty work for you, the bottom line is you’ll probably pay for it, either way.