Floors and Walls

We've been at a slow pace with the kitchen due to the crazy amount of inspections our town requires (like an insulation inspection!) and scheduling some of the subcontractors.

I know on many renovation blogs, some people have mixed emotions about hiring some of the work out. After working on a few rooms in our house, I learned that I won't touch electrical and professional drywallers are magic. When we opened the walls of the kitchen, we found knob and tube, some interesting 1980s electrical fixes, and singe marks from some old lighting fixers on some of the upper beams. Deciding not to burn our house down by doing the electrical ourselves was an easy decision. We found a local company that are known to work with knob and tube and so far we've been really happy with their work.

On Sunday, we tackled a project that we knew how to do well. Refinishing the kitchen floors!

As you can see, we've replaced the old window, the electrical is roughed-in, and insulation has been added. So, back to the floors. They weren't bad but there was an old slightly sticky layer of dark glue that was probably put down on the floor when the house was built. When we did the demo of the room, we were lucky and only had to remove a layer of luon and peel and stick tile. I'm assuming that when the room was last renovated in the 1980s, that they removed the original linoleum but left the glue remnants.

A little glue wasn't going to scare us (although in the end the glue kept sticking to the sandpaper). This was our third go at using the drum sander in our house. Remember when we refinished the floors upstairs?

Under the window, hidden beneath the cabinets, was a nice hole. Perhaps they cut it out for a vent...who knows?! Finding 2 1/2 inch width heart pine became a bit of a task. After calling around to a few salvage places in the Philly area, we were blessed with finding stock at Provenance Architecturals. Seriously the dreamiest place in the world. Not only do they have cool salvaged items but they also have a nice stock of live edge slabs that are exquisite. We gathered some floor boards from the store (and tried not to purchase anything else) and feathered them into the space where we had no floor.

So, why am I not sharing beautiful refinished floor pictures? Because they aren't done yet. On Sunday night, we added the first layer of poly onto our freshly sanded floors and then found out the next day that the drywallers wanted to come on Tuesday (they were originally scheduled to come on Thursday). We let that first layer of poly dry and today we covered the floors up with paper. But today, today we will have walls!