Wednesday, October 7, 2009

The Kitchen Reno - Part 2.2: Demolition! Day 2

On Day 2 of Demolition, we took out the ceramic flooring. There's no real graceful way to take this type of flooring out, other than to smash it to bits and shovel it into buckets. One tip I offer is, if you're going to go the sledgehammer route, take a heavier blanket (in this case we used some discarded curtains) and place it on the floor. Hammer the tiles underneath the blanket in order to keep the dust down. It's a dirty job, but anything you can do to keep the dust down is a plus - it really helped!

Another thing worth noting, is that hammering the crap out of the floor will make a mess in the area below where you're working. Lots of little sawdust bits, chunks of wood, and dust were distributed throughout the basement while we smashed the floor. Don't know how you can stop that, but you should be aware!




You're doing a great job Bruvey.



The view after the ceramic floor was removed. At this point we weren't sure exactly what we should do about the levelling compound that was all over the floor. I had assumed that, since the original ceramic floor had been improperly installed, it had actually been installed directly onto the subfloor, without adding a new layer. Well, I was wrong again - All we had to do to clean up the levelling compound was pull up that top layer of subfloor and chuck it in the bin.



After trying several different methods of removing the sub-floor, we found that the teamwork-garden-shovel method worked the best. After that, we just ripped all the pieces off the floor and discarded them! You want a good quality, heavy steel garden shovel with a good lift to act as a lever to pry the flooring free. After the subfloor was removed, I had to crawl around on my hands and knees and pull out all the screws that were used to hold that subfloor layer in place. Thank god they missed the studs on most of the screws, and I was able to use a claw-hammer to rip em out.



It's more work when the plywood "rips" but, we were learning!




Here's the load we took to the dump. Our dumping fee was only $55. Just over 1 ton of rubble (not including the appliances). Much better than the $400 it would have cost me to have a dumpster. You were right honey. :)










Ben Sage, Sales Representative. Re/Max a-b Realty Ltd., Brokerage. 519-536-7535. 521 Dundas St., Woodstock, ON

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