[jyl]

Interesting scraping the vinyl tile. Sometimes it is easy, get in a rythym with the long handled scraper and the tile peels off in long sheets. Other times there is an area where the tile was really stuck down, and instead of peeling off, the tile splits into layers and the bottom greenish layers are firmly stuck down and impossible to catch with the scraper. I rented a small power floor scraper, and it can get under those layers and lift them, so the manual scraping can resume. The power scraper can also shave down thick areas of adhesive (cutback?) to leave just a thin coating. So far, gouges etc to the wood are, err, few and acceptable. Well, there is that one spot . . . All in all, much much nicer work than cutting out stone tile and WonderBoard, but not as nice as removing plywood.

I struggle to understand what they were doing here. Most of the kitchen has that thin vinyl tile stuck down with cutback. But there are areas where they screwed down thin 2” wide strips of wood, about 12” spaced, and filled the areas between them with a sort of super thin plaster or ceramic material. That is easily to take up, the power scraper goes through it like mowing a lawn. Until it hits a screw, which you can’t see. I’ve had to hammer the blade edge straight several times. Was that wood strip/plaster area considered decorative? Bizarre.

Hmm, there used to be a mudroom off the end of the kitchen. They made it into an extension of the kitchen, with a 2’ stub of the old wall left to define an alcove at the end of the kitchen, French Doors to a small deck, and a half-bathroom. All very well, except that the 1x4 fir flooring is interrupted where the wall between the mudroom and kitchen was removed. No biggie, I’ll rip down some of the old studs I’m pulling out of here to fill that gap. The discontinuity will tell the story of the house. And those old studs are beautiful old growth wood.