We started in the dining room because it is sort of isolated in terms of flooring--the only room it opens up to is the kitchen and that has the requisite linoleum anyway. So if we do this one room and decide it is just too much work or if we screw up the laminate installation, then having just the isolated dining room with different flooring won't look so bad. Plus, it has sliding doors to close it off from the rest of the house so we can avoid contaminating the rest of the house with ancient adhesive and tile dust.
From Home Depot we armed ourselves with a Wonder Bar (not a wonder bra...), a chisel, dust masks, ear plugs, very stylish knee pads, and a "professional grade floor scraper".
Here's what we started with--low-end, crappy, light colored carpet (that has since become even crappier and darker-colored, thanks to the dogs and our muddy feet):
I spent the morning removing all the stuff from the room, which, of course, includes all 3 sets of china (how did I acquire this much stuff?), the house plants, the pictures, and the crystal. Then Dave helped me move all the furniture. All of it (except for the hutch) fit into the guest bedroom, surprisingly. I think I made something like 40 trips from the dining room to the guest room. The hutch is hanging out in the living room for the time being.
We rolled up the carpet and the foam stuff and hauled it out to the garage. I guess we'll just pile it up and take it to the dump later. We've looked under the carpet before so we knew what the tiles looked like...but it is pretty hideous to see an entire room covered in that stuff! And boy does it make the room echo-y. Our dining room suddenly looked like a 1950s high school multipurpose room:
There were holes all over the room about 1/2 inch across, most of which were plugged with a plastic cap. We think these are the holes the pest guy drilled all over the house (before we bought it) to poison the ground-dwelling termites that infested a few of the rooms. Gross. It is said that there are only two types of houses: those that have had termites and those that will have termites. Here in Davis we have the ground-dwelling type mostly. Since we live in an oldish house that is adjacent to an oldish park with lots of huge trees, I'm not surprised at all by the little buggers. Anyway...
The first few tiles just popped right off and in nice large pieces. I quickly realized that I had (of course) started in the very easiest corner of the room because NONE of the rest of the tiles came off so easily. I used that fancy scrapper a lot and found that it worked best when I used my right arm to ram it under the tile's edge. Others required use of the chisel and hammer and even then only came off in very small, very unsatisfying little pieces. Here's my progress after only 1 hour:
After a while Dave came back inside (he was using the remaining sunlight of the day to work on the gates outside) to help me. He realized that if you just smack the tile edge with a hammer they will just bust apart, without damaging the concrete underneath. Sweet! We finished the remaining 2/3 of the room in no time at all (well, 30 minutes). The floor is black from the adhesive, but it is smooth and not sticky. All we have to do now is fill those termite poison holes with filler, choose our laminate, figure out how to install it (and if we need to do anything to remedy the remaining film of adhesive on the concrete--to ensure that the new adhesive will stick properly), and install it. We'll also replace the base trim to make the room look pretty. I'm confident that the hardest part is past us now. Except that we still have another 1000 square feet of floor left to do in the rest of the house...sigh...
It's been a lot of work so far (we're still very sore) but we know that there are worse things we could do with our time than to work on our home together. Thanks for reading!
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