The 60-year old tiles!

My husband "T" made sure that I disclose on the blog, that most of the demolition work is by him and his BFF "E".   So there!

It's true that they both put a lot of time, thoughts, and effort, without which we could not have done this much in a relatively short time, so THANKS guys!

Underneath the carpet that we removed laid the original tiles from 1950, sitting firmly (stuck) to the cement subfloor.  Here, you can see reddish-brown tiles under the mangled carpet (we were quite inexperienced in carpet rolling).

With an impulsive decision, we started scraping them away with a couple of floor scraper, one of which broke, so I had to run to a hardware store to get another one.  During my break errand run, the guys found difficulty with many, many stubborn sections.  Thankfully, being creative problem-solvers that they are, we did not give up and call the pros.  (One thing we won't do is to pay somebody to destroy our things.  We'll do it ourselves, thankyouverymuch.) 

Hammers to the rescue!

That's right, T and E ended up hammering the sh*t out of those tiles, throughout the whole house, while I scraped away what I could.  Was I concerned about the foundation being cracked?  Hell yes!  But what could I do... they needed the exercise. 

Here's one pile-o-tile from one room... and we had 4 roomfuls of similar waste. 

And the cement underneath.

Everybody slept very well that night and woke up with sore arms and chest.