Tale of Tanglewood: Floors, Floors, Floors.....and Trees.

We have spent the last few days removing all of the old flooring at Tanglewood. We are torturing ourselves with this task so that we can try to save a little money. (We are replacing all of the flooring in the house except for one room, so we have to save where can.) Here are some pictures of the floors that were in the house....the good news is that we are ALMOST done getting it all out:

Brown paper bag flooring in the formal dining room

Brown paper bag flooring in the living room

Brown paper bag flooring in Declan's bedroom

Brown paper bag flooring in the formal living room

Brown paper bag flooring in the front door entry way and guest bedroom

Peel and stick tile in the master closets

Linoleum flooring in the kitchen area

Carpet and tile in the den area

By far, the linoleum glue (not so much the linoleum itself) has been the toughest to remove. We first approached the linoleum glue with this thing:


A flat hoe. This was a good idea in theory, but did it actually do anything besides prevent us from getting down on our hands and knees? That would be a big NO! So we moved on to this after a very convincing YouTube video:

The Spyder Reciprocating Saw Scraper Attachments
This was definitely better than the flat hoe, but we could only ever get it to take the top layer of the glue off. We couldn't get it to scrape all the way to the concrete like we needed. (YouTube man LIES!) Plus the saw was heavy to hold, and we only have one. Chris did decide to try these attachments on the master bath tile, and every single one of the attachments may or may not have broken on him. So, yeah, don't use these on tile. As a matter of fact, just don't waste your time buying these for scraping floors because here is the golden tool:


American Line razor blade floor scraper. My stepdad conveniently had two of these scrapers, and they worked like a charm! We are extremely sore and have no feeling in our arms, but the linoleum glue is all up because of this magic tool! Another thing that helped immensely with this scraper was using a sprayer to lightly spray hot water onto the glue and letting it sit for about four hours. Chris went and sprayed the floor early one morning, and then that afternoon, I went over to scrape, and the glue came up so easy! This scraper also did wonders with the brown paper bag flooring that we couldn't just pull up with our hands and the tile in the master bathroom

Chris was able to pull up the carpet and carpet pad in the den in about 20 minutes one afternoon, so there was no trouble there. We are going to leave the brown paper bag flooring in Declan's bedroom because it is laid a whole lot better than in any other rooms in the house. We have decided on carpet in his room so there will be no problems placing carpet over that.

The one area of flooring remaining is the tile in the den. So far, Chris has knocked some of it loose with a pickaxe, but we are going to need to try something else for this. The pickaxe will take years, and we don't have years. Suggestions in this area would be helpful. I believe it is porcelain tile, and it is on concrete.

Now the exciting part about the flooring. We have hired a guy through Georgia Carpet Mill to lay our floors. His name is Walter, and we think he is wonderful. I'll introduce you all to Walter later. The floors will be one of the last big projects we have done on the house. Here's a sneak peak of what we have chosen, though. A hand-scraped engineered hardwood, ceramic tile, and carpet:

So the floor removal is coming along nicely and is just about done. My next project, while Chris continues the den tile removal, is the kitchen cabinets. If you remember, here is what the kitchen looked like:

When my arms or my knees got tired these last few days from scraping the floors, I removed all of the cabinet doors, drawers, and hardware. My goal for this coming weekend is to shop vac and disinfect these cabinets and actually get them painted. The sooner we can get the painting done and the counter tops removed, the sooner we can get our beautiful, new QUARTZ counter tops put on! (more on that to come)

Here are the existing door knobs and drawer handles in the kitchen. We are actually going to go ahead and keep these because they are in good shape and they will go well with our stainless steel appliances:

As I mentioned in the last post, we had some trees lofted and some trees cut down today. The tree service company still has to grind the stumps, so I wanted to wait until they were completely done before showing any pictures of their work so far. I am very excited for you all to see how much better it already looks in the front yard. It's amazing the difference a few trees can make. Here are the before pics: