Demo Day: DIY Hardwood Floors

Before we can install our new hardwood floors, we have to rip out the existing floors. Duh.

Here's a recap of what we're working with: Carpet in the bedrooms; LVP in the hallway, office, and living room (all different colors btw), tile in the kitchen. We're leaving the tile in our bathrooms and laundry room. More on those later.

Carpet

I'm convinced that anyone who says they like carpet has never ripped it out. It's actually disgusting. I had cleaned these carpets so many times and the dirt and who-knows-what-else that went flying as we rolled that up... I just can't.

First things first, remove the baseboards. Baseboards sit on top of your flooring, so peel those babies off first. Then, you can just cut through your carpet with a utility knife to make manageable strips. You'll roll up the carpet, then do the same thing with the pad underneath. Be careful! There will be staples along the floor and a tack board along the edge of the room. Take these out carefully and dispose of them safely so no one gets stabbed.

Luxury Vinyl Plank

LVP is one of the easiest things to take up. Most of them have a foam backing and are click-in, which allows them to "float." Basically this means that the flooring isn't really connected to anything, it just sits on top of whatever subfloor you have underneath it and clicks into place with itself. You put your baseboards on top and WAMO, you're done.

But in our house, removing the LVP is where things started to get... interesting. In our hallway, there were actually 2 layers of flooring, then the subfloor. That was fine. Just take up two layers instead of one.

Then we got to the transition between the hallway and the living room, where the floor wasn't exactly level with itself. If you read my post about why we chose hardwoods, you'll already know that we had several different LVPs in our house, so we thought this was simply because one flooring was thicker than the other, and it was.

But that wasn't all that was thicker.

As we started to remove the LVP in the living room, we realized that subfloors weren't level with each other. The living room was a whole 3/8" taller than the hallway and bedrooms.... GREAT.

The Subfloor

Upon further investigation, we realized that when our house was originally built, it had a sunken living room. The previous owners had the living room built up to be the same level (almost) with the rest of the house. But the subfloor that was used was thicker than the plywood subfloor in the rest of the house. Here comes the dilemma.

Do we replace the living room subfloor with plywood of the appropriate thickness or do we leave it as is and try to transition it over?

Ultimately we decided we'd just replace the subfloor. Since our goal was consistency throughout the house, we really didn't want to stop and start the flooring at this transition. It would defeat the purpose of the whole project.

But wait. It gets better. The subfloor in the living room was screwed down. And nailed down. And GLUED. Yep. Glued. These people were apparently very confident that no one would ever renovate this home if they decided GLUE their subfloor to the joists.

After attempting to get a section of this out, we decided to call in the calvary over a weekend for this one. My mom and my mother in law both came over to help us decide how to tackle the glue removal. Eventually we ended up cutting between to joists with a circular saw and then just physically pulling the subfloor off the joists. My years of powerlifting finally proved useful that day.

Getting the subfloor out took 3 whole days with 3 full time people (plus a cameo by my mom). It really ended up being a blessing in disguise (silver linings all the way) because we found something else to fix while we were in there. Of course.

When the previous owners had built up the sunken living room, they hadn't cross-braced the floor joists. Bracing the floor joists is super easy. All you do is add shorter pieces of wood in between the longer pieces of wood, thereby securing everything to each other. When you don't do this, it means the long joists are only attached at each end of the room, with no additional support throughout the room. The main problem this can cause is the floor sagging in the middle. So we went ahead and fixed that while we had the opportunity.

Once the old particle board with all its nails, screws and glue had finally been removed, we just secured the new plywood subfloor to the joists... with screws and only screws.

Tile

Finally, we got to the kitchen and started chiseling up the tile. This space was a little more straight-forward, as the tile only went up to the cabinets and not under them (we'll get to that later too). Chiseling the tile up was the easy part. After that, we had to scrape the grout off of the subfloor so we'd have an even surface to work with. While it took us quite a while because it is hard and tedious work, the process is actually pretty simple. Put your chisel under the tile, pull it up, scrape the subfloor below.

AND FINALLY after all of that, we're ready to actually start laying our new hardwood floors!

Stay tuned for the next step in this project!