Saturday, December 4, 2010

i'm thankful for wrecking bars

it started with the floor. i assume there are photos of our kitchen floor. the wandering zig-zag beige tiles made me dizzy, the tiles were cracked as per poor installation, and there was a 1" toe-busting transition step from the dining room. too long had the wood floor underneath been kept from us.

i am thankful for my 7 1/4" diamond blade because it cuts through tile and grout like a hot knife through butter. the basic strategy is to cut out the grout with the saw, then hammer and pry up the tiles and fiber-board with a flat wrecking bar. in the end, the tiles look much better as a pile of rubble in our driveway. i am thankful for the pile of rubble in my driveway that once was my kitchen floor.

dust is the biggest problem. we set up a drop-cloth "kill room" to keep the bulk of dust out of the rest of the house, and we used a combination of shop-vac, water spray bottle, and fans to control the dust as best we can. since the dust is largely composed of tiny fragments of ceramic and glass, i recommend a mask of some sort.

underneath, the wood floors are a bit beaten, but i think they will salvage nicely. they will salvage nicely when we get around to it, because apparently this is only the beginning.

intrigued by the growing pile of rubble in our driveway, our neighbor randy stopped by to see what we were doing. he is often amused by our projects. "cool pile of rubble," he observed.

"check out our floor," rebecca bragged.

"nice," randy agreed politely. "hey, if you knock out this wall, your kitchen would be totally awesome," he suggested.

"cool! that's the best idea ever," rebecca agreed. "here's a hammer," she offered making swinging motions.

i swear, it happened just like something along those lines. almost exactly similarly. in any case, the wall at the end of the kitchen is coming out. as the pictures show, we are committed - which is to say that all but the timbers and some wiring have been removed.

as it turns out, all this talk about removing walls has made us aware that we are, in fact, missing a wall that probably should not have been removed, so i suppose we'll be correcting that oversight as well.

good bye ugly tiles.