Cutting a Strip off the Floor

So then. In the spirit of getting things rolling, we started some work on the bathrooms. Before we do any framing, we have a couple things we need to get done: we have to trim back the vinyl floor the previous owners installed, and we need to do more demolition (we always need to do more demolition).

(As always, if you want to join us for demolishing some stuff, let me know; I think we'll be doing this demolition next Saturday.)

In this photo you can see part of the reason why we need to trim back the vinyl floor. The wall they put in is all wibbly-wobbly, curving around on the floor weirdly. I mean, there aren't a lot of straight lines in this house, on account of over 100 years old and all that, but this one is particularly egregious. Note that the camera here is straight on the horizontal.

And it's not noisy, dusty work without a dog sticking her snoot in.

The wall the previous owners installed was so off-straight that at this end, we only had to trim off a tiny section of flooring, and the amount we trimmed off grew as we made progress.

The Fein Tool was again the winner for this project. It wasn't painless and effortless, but it was way way way more simple than pretty much any other method.

When they installed this flooring -- 1/4" plywood with vinyl peel-and-stick tiles -- they stopped it inside the doorway of what had been the closet. That's going to be under our new wall, so it's getting sliced off.

We've noted a couple of things in this process: first, they certainly used a lot of nails to attach these crappy materials to the floor. And second, the hallway floor may not be in as dire a condition as we thought, if the edges are any indication (which they really are not, reasonably; nobody walks down the edges of hallways).

We keep thinking about ripping up the vinyl floors and sanding/painting the hallway and dining room floors; that's off in the future now because we want to get this project done before the permit expires.

And you can see the sliced-off strip getting wider. I like how you can see the outline of the floor edge in dirt.

We stopped the cutting just past where the stair comes down to meet the floor. We could remove more, but doing so would just create an unpleasant little gap that will fill up with dirt and dog hair, as all unpleasant little gaps do.

Next up, we have to cut away the floor for the new closet. Then we need to demo a bunch of residual wall bits, including disconnecting the furnace air return.

posted by ayse on 09/07/13