So we decided to tear out the old floor from the former kitchen and will lay down new hardwood floors. Rather ambitious even for us but thankfully since my mom is here, we have a very good guide who can walk us through everything. Otherwise we’d have to be refiguring our budget again to find a way to get Macky to take care of all this.
As you can see, this actually did require some very physical labor since the boards were being held down by 4 inch nails. And when we were taking the damaged boards off, we were pretty surprised to find that the floor underneath is completely sand. Apparently they used to just fill up around the floor beams with sand which kept everything stable and insulated the floors as well…and of course it was rather cheap and natural so it’s hard to go wrong there.
A few of the beams we needed to piece together with smaller scraps since they had shifted a bit and we needed to flip all of the beams over since they were covered with nails which didn’t come out when we pried the boards off. We also had to replace the beam on the far right side which had so much water damage. This meant digging out quite a bit of sand which we ended up putting in the barn and will be using to fill in the floor later on when we lay the old bricks down out there.
Once we got all of the beams resituated and leveled out, we started with laying the new floors and we luckily were able to find floors which are a close match to those in the living room. We imagine that the other half of the floors in the former dining room will be the same color as those and therefore the new pieces we have installed should match up nicely…but we won’t know until Macky gets his sanding guys in there to finish things up.
Laying the entire new floor took us about 4 hours and after all the work we’d already done earlier in the day, I’m almost surprised we finished. There was a period of time when we were about one-third done when I was pretty ready to call it quits…but it was actually only 5:30 pm and that’s just not a proper time to stop so we kept on going. I’m quite glad we did since we were in the groove then and things seemed to go faster after that. Who knew we could be so handy with circular saw, a few hammers and a nail set…and of course a mommy who knows how to do all this stuff lol.
