Kitchen Floor Pt. 3

After the dust had settled from the week long demolition of our floors, we decided to begin our weekend by creating even more dust to sit on top of the dust we already made. the more the merrier right?

The goal for Saturday was to install a subfloor with the help of Mark and Leigh (Tori's Mom and Stepdad) that would level off the different areas of the room providing us with an even surface to install our vinyl plank flooring. The elephant in the room was a giant 4 foot by 2 foot pad of concrete that sat at one end of the room, closest to our laundry room door. Throughout the week we had developed a multitude of theroies as to what the purpose of this pad was. Was is an old fireplace? A solid footing for an old furnace or oil heater? Was it the final resting place for one of the previous owners enemies? We we're stumped...

- Mysterious concrete slab from Part 2.

What we did know was that in order to install the subfloor, it had to be capped or removed. Our original plan was to chisel off some of the top but the air chisel we borrowed was not cooperating. Our attempt to trim the surface using hand tools proved just as difficult. This left us with one other option. Remove it.

We had to dig up some more information about this slab and that required a trip to the basement or as I call it Cricketville. (we have a lot of crickets under there.) After Victoria and I ventured into the crawlspace we noticed that we could see some concrete above the floorboards in the location we belived the slab resided. After a couple of swings with a sledgerhammer it was apparent that the slab was only a few inches thick. We then decided to break it up into pieces remove as much as we could.

After some "archaeology" as I was calling it, we soon had the enough of the slab removed. Mark made a frame out of 2x4's and capped it with some of the plywood we removed from the carpeted section of the floor a few days earlier.

- Slab removed!

With the giant slab of concrete out of the way the rest of the subfloor was laid down with relative ease. I helped Mark measure and cut the 4ft x 8ft sections of underlayment while Victoria stapled them in place. Mark was a real help with his expert carpentry skills. After Saturday I have a new appreciation of what you can do with a circular saw, especially a left-handed one.

- another top quality photo by Victoria.

All we have left now is to install the floor. It's a daunting task for two budding DIY'ers but I'm sure we can figure it out. At this point with just the subfloor in place you can see how much bigger the room looks. The absence of the dark burgundy carpet really brightens the room up as you can see from the daytime photos below. Its a small glimpse of what the room will look like when we are finished. Until Part 4... enjoy the photos.

The After