First, we had to remove the baseboards. That was a little tough because there was like nine thousand layers of paint on them. Also, since this house is apparently spider utopia, I had to kill about 30 spiders along the baseboards. (Apologies to all arachnid enthusiasts; I love insects but just cannot abide spiders.) I think more came out after I started to see what was going on. The people who installed the baseboards were apparently a little nervous about them staying... they used one boatload of 4-inch casing nails along with a bunch of screws drilled in at random.
| You can see two of the screw holes here |
I only broke two baseboards, and they were just little ones so I feel like that's ok? Since the nails were super long, it was a total bitch getting them all out, especially since we have pretty pitiful apartment hammers.
| breathe... push! |
After that, we started working from The Hole to the corner behind the fridge. There was a weird bendy pipe possibly a gas line thing in that corner so we thought we get the difficult part out of the way. Hahahahahahaha no.
| Any tips on wtf that is? |
It took us like a half hour to get up this corner, even though it was only glued around the edges. Unfortunately, ripping up the floor also tore the crap out of the plywood underlayment. Also, apparently the original floor installers liked to use glitter as a marker, but it is way more fun to imagine that they just used glitter glue to attach the flooring.
| Or the floor was installed by David Bowie |
At that point, Adamo's mom, uncle, and brother showed up like a band of angel assistants with a puppy imp because they are the best. My mom wanted me to save some linoleum for her cabins in the white mountains, so I cut out the middle of the flooring.
| I felt a lot more accomplished after that! |
We started working around the edges, slowly ripping them (and bits of plywood D:) up. Eventually we realized that we were going to have to remove the rubber baseboards on the cabinets, the trash compactor, and the freaking stove. Thank goodness that Adamo's uncle was there because I probably would have tried doing it myself with phone guidance from my dad and likely blown up the whole house.
After much elbow grease and sweating, we finally pulled up all of the flooring. Then it was even more apparent that I hadn't planned ahead—we didn't have some crucials like heavy duty trash bags, a broom, trash bin, etc. :-[
So we stuffed all the gluey vinyl in the pantry.
| (–_— ;) |
Also, while we were doing this Adamo's uncle and brother carried the washer and dryer we bought in from the garage and set it up on some pallets we found. They are amazing!!!
| Now the lonely toilet isn't lonely anymore! |
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