The great kitchen reveal: Demo

My dad came down from Washington to help us demolish our old kitchen. His plane arrived at about 7 pm on a Thursday night and by 7:43 he had already taken a hammer to the gross tile. Our first mission was to see if we could salvage the original hardwood floors in the room. It looked promising from this initial destruction.

Then, the ear doctor and my dad got to work ripping all the cabinets down.

I went off to work one day with a kitchen and came back to an almost empty room. It's really surprising how much damage two people with sledge hammers can do. Oh, and BTW, no one rocks suspenders like my dad!

All that was left was that crappy flooring. There were only 2 layers of flooring stacked up on top of the hard wood. The top layer was this tile adhered to 3/4" thick cement board. Under the cement board there was a layer of ancient vinyl and then...the glorious original hardwood floors> Unfortunatley we had to get through them all to see the floor.

The tile came up easy by smashing it and sweeping up the pieces. Then, the cement board was screwed every 4 inches into the floor. Each screw had to be backed out:

Then the cement board was ripped up. The top vinyl itself came up with a rented floor scraper and a lot of muscle and we were left with this thick, black, tar-like adhesive.

We tried EVERYTHING to get this stuff up, but it had soaked into the hardwood and was impossible. After hours of attempting to save the original floor and making the inside of our house smell like a freshly laid freeway we gave up. The floor had to come out.

I was devastated.

And the ear doctor wasn't much better.

But guess what is kind of fun? Ripping out hardwood flooring:

Luckily, our subfloor was still perfect!

The room was now empty and waiting for new stuff to go in!