Dining Room Floor Demo

Today, Liz and I spent a very long day working on getting the floor up in the dining room. Our floor actually consists of a few layers – a thin floor veneer on top, and below that an older layer of hardwood floors (and below that the substrate/subfloor).

Before we can get new floors down, the two two layers need to get removed. And we have some build-up work to do after the demo, possibly.

We got the room cleared out easily enough (this is Liz’s) temporary (boy is that sure a loaded word) office.

A floor vent we’re going to need to work around.

View of the fireplace.

And we’re off! The first layer is really thin, and came up quite easily.

Biggest challenge here was the many thin nails that were still sticking up, after the first layer was removed. But it didn’t make sense for us to pull all those, since this following layer also was going to get removed.

Another view of the demo in progress.

Most of the first layer all gone. We had to stop at several times to haul this debris outside, so we could have enough space to keep going.

Keep in mind this is still the first layer. We basically had to go through the room a second time, to remove that layer you’re seeing (underneath the debris).

I didn’t get any photos during this second phase. But hopefully you can tell the difference between the previous photo and this one.

Cleaning all this up was, in and of itself, yet another big task.

All told, we started a bit before noon and finshed up closer to 7:30 PM I want to say. A really, really long day. I think for the other rooms, we may want to split this work up over multiple days, just so we don’t have to marathon it again.

I still had a lot of the floor boards outside, in a huge pile. And while I was tempted to keep working and cutting that all down for the trash bins… we had several neighbors near us hosting Fourth of July parties. And I hated to interrupt their festivities with the sound of a circular saw going for an hour or more.

So I decided to save that work for tomorrow. Long enough day as it was.

Related:
Guest Room Floor Demo
Master Bedroom Floor Demo, Part 2
Master Bedroom Floor Demo, Part 1